Amazon Alexa users across Europe were assistant-less for part of today. Users reported that Alexa went down in various countries, including Germany, Spain, and parts of the UK. The issues appear to have started around 8AM GMT, with the service coming online again around 2PM GMT, according to Twitter users. It’s unclear what caused the outage, although Engadget posits that it might because of a reported error at the Amazon Web Services facility in Ireland. (That issue is now marked as corrected online.)

Finally Alexa is up after being down for a few hours. Do not expect such long outage with company like Amazon! — Kishan Gor (@ksg91) September 26, 2018

Luckily, my #alexa announces the time at hourly intervals. Otherwise, I'd never have known she's no longer down. I kinda think she should have announced she was back with a bit of groveling though. Thanks @AmazonUK & @AmazonechoUK for..waiiiit.. nvm: You were completely silent. pic.twitter.com/P8wdImNndH — Amber MacLeod (@Canadonia) September 26, 2018

Most people online seem to be upset that Amazon gave no update or word about what was happening and why. It’s totally understandable that they’d be frustrated. Given that Amazon wants people to turn their homes into complete Alexa hubs, down to their microwaves, the company needs to be more open about outages and communicative about why the assistant isn’t responsive. We’ve reached out to Amazon for further comment and will update when we hear back.