Amazon confirms Alexa outage in UK and mainland Europe

Amazon has confirmed its Alexa virtual assistant service suffered an outage in the UK and mainland Europe but is now back to normal. The Downdetector website reported a wave of Alexa outages in the UK and across Europe on Friday morning at about 7am GMT, with the reports spread throughout the UK. An Amazon spokesperson said: "This morning we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers' ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally." Many users said they had been left unable to wake their voice-activated Amazon Echo smart devices, with some seeing a ring of red lights and a message asking them to try again later or that "something went wrong".