Amazon had a pretty stellar holiday season this year. Some of the people trying to set up their Alexa smart speakers Christmas morning? Not so much. According to The Guardian, Alexa servers in Europe failed just as hordes of new users tried to register their devices.
The server outage reportedly occurred around 10am GMT, and a gander into the Twitterverse shows plenty of cheesed customers who were unable to play their favourite Christmas tunes, turn on their lights, or register new devices. A look at Outage.Report’s Alexa map for Christmas Day also shows Amazon’s virtual assistant struggled in the U.K., Germany, and Italy. There weren’t any widespread reports in the U.S., and Amazon’s customer service Twitter has been responding to individual complaints saying some services in Europe had intermittent connections, but that the issues have been resolved.
I’m sorry for the trouble! Some Echo devices in Europe had intermittent connections. These issues have now been resolved and the Alexa Service is working normally. Please let us know if it’s still giving you trouble. ^BH
— Amazon Help (@AmazonHelp) December 25, 2018
@amazonecho Alexa isn’t happy this morning. Tried the good old turn it off, turn it on again trick but no luck. I’ll have to talk to my family instead. #alexa #amazon #amazonecho #echonotworking. pic.twitter.com/Bm0h1xLboY
— Paul Foster (@fozrobin) December 25, 2018
Despite the outages, Amazon announced today it had a record-breaking holiday season, with the Echo Dot as one of its top sellers, along with the regular Echo, and surprisingly, Amazon Smart Plug. (Amazon did not immediately respond to an email about the reported outage.)
While Amazon is notorious for keeping hard numbers under lock and key, it did say the number one Alexa request this year was “Alexa, turn on the Christmas tree.” Its virtual assistant also reportedly delivered eight times the number of holiday reminders as last year and set more than one million holiday timers. The Alexa app is also sitting pretty atop both the iOS and Android app charts today, meaning thousands of you ignored our advice that the Amazon Echo was a crap gift. It’s OK. We don’t take it too personally.