Amazon's issue also affected us, we'd add — it prevented us from updating the site properly for a few hours. Sorry about that.

We've asked Amazon for comment and will let you know when it can share more details. Whatever it says, the incident is a not-so-subtle reminder of the risks involved in making a device heavily dependent on the internet, even for local tasks. It's great when it works, but it can be maddening when everything goes south. And there's a certain irony to this when Amazon just ran a Super Bowl ad where Alexa lost her voice -- it clearly wasn't expecting that to happen in real life.