Amazon Alexa down: the smart assistant is struggling to find its voice

Alexa, why are you so mean?

Have spoken to the in-laws, and they confirm their Echo Dot is not working, even after a hard reset.

And we're seeing plenty of you experiencing the same problem – let us know the issues you're facing this morning by tweeting us @techradar.

Not gonna lie, I'm sitting here smugly at home as I went down the Google Assistant route for my smart home setup, rather than opting for Alexa, and everything is working smoothly for me.

However, it just goes to show how fragile the smart home is, with a heavy reliance on connectivity and external factors that can render it relatively useless at the drop of a hat.

Today it's Amazon suffering the outage, but it could just as easily be Apple's Siri or Google's Assistant next time. Robots aren't quite ready to take over the planet just yet then.

There appears to be a variety of issues people are facing with their Alexa and Echo devices today.

• Devices showing as ‘offline'
• A red light ring (rather than the normal blue)
• Voice prompts such as “I'm having difficulty understanding right now” and “‘something has gone wrong”
• Very slow to process requests

Amazon outage in the UK

The Amazon outage is definitely affecting UK users, with our own Carrie Marshall providing this nugget of information.

“Just had my dad on the phone complaining all his Echo devices say ‘something has gone wrong' when he tries to use them. Mine are working but are taking a long time (around 20 seconds) to process the request.”

Widespread reports from around the internet suggest there are major issues with Amazon's Alexa network, rendering the smart assistant useless for owners of Amazon Echo speakers and other devices which support the AI.

We have contacted Amazon for comment, and will bring you all the latest on the service outage right here, as it happens.