Number of users plugging in products using virtual assistant causes outage in Europe

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Thousands of people plugging in new smart speakers on Christmas Day were greeted by a less than smart response after Amazon’s voice-controlled virtual assistant Alexa crashed.

Servers controlling the digital butler were overloaded with questions and requests, prompting Alexa to tell some users: “Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding you right now.”

The crash, at about 10am GMT, caused Amazon customers to complain about not being able to play festive songs, turn on their living room lights or get cooking instructions for Christmas dinner.

Richard Hyland tweeted: “Good day for Amazon’s Alexa to crash. It’s not like people might want to register new devices or play music or anything.”

Alexa's advice to 'kill your foster parents' fuels concern over Amazon Echo Read more

Alexa works by sending voice commands via an Amazon Echo device to a server, where a computer interprets them. Instructions then go back to the Echo and the gadget plays music, reads the weather and performs tasks such as turning the lights on.

At around lunchtime, Amazon’s customer service account tweeted to say “some Echo devices in Europe have had intermittent connections” over the previous two hours. It said the issues had since been resolved.

An Amazon spokesperson said: “For a short period on 25th December, we had an issue that intermittently impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally.”

Alexa sparked controversy last year after reports that a customer was told by Alexa to “kill your foster parents”. The user, who heard the message on his Echo device, wrote a review on Amazon’s website calling Alexa’s words “a whole new level of creepy”.

An investigation discovered that the bot had quoted from the social media site Reddit, known for its harsh and sometimes abusive content.