“Sorry, I didn’t understand, the internet connection is having problems.” Since late Monday afternoon, many users of the Alexa voice assistant have been hearing this sentence from their Amazon Echo speakers. An internet connection is essential for Alexa to work.
The Down Detector website, which reports real-time status of various websites and services, has seen a sharp increase in outage reports since around 4 p.m. The error appears to persist as the number of complaints continues to rise, peaking around 8:00 p.m.
However, according to Down Detector, these outages mainly affect the north-east of France, but also Belgium. The reports focus mainly on the Paris region, but also around Lille, Reims and Troyes.
Just before 10 p.m., 47% of customers affected by the outage reported a connection problem, 41% reported a problem connecting to the server, and 12% reported a problem connecting to the Alexa application. Without a connection to the Internet, Amazon’s voice assistant cannot function properly.
Amazon’s service quality monitoring table does not report any technical issues.