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Sonos speakers experience Google Assistant, Alexa outages one day after update

Sonos has announced it's rolling out a fix for playing Spotify on its smart speakers just a day after adding Google Assistant.

Ty Pendlebury Editor
Ty Pendlebury is a journalism graduate of RMIT Melbourne, and has worked at CNET since 2006. He lives in New York City where he writes about streaming and home audio.
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Ty Pendlebury
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2 min read
sonos-googleassistant

Google Assistant arrived on Sonos on May 14.

 Sonos

Sonos confirmed users were having problems with playing Spotify via  Alexa and Google Assistant  after an an outage and the company said it was working on the issue. 

"We experienced a temporary outage for some of our customers this morning as a result of the firmware update to Sonos players," the company said in a statement to CNET.

The issues come one day after Sonos began rolling out its long-awaited update to allow Google Assistant integration for its Beam and One smart speakers. The company announced both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant support back in 2017. 

The company said the outage "wasn't related to the Google Assistant launch," but the outage affected playback when customers were using partner control options such as Spotify, Alexa and Google .

"We have implemented a fix, which is currently rolling out to customers through the day. In the meantime, you can use the Sonos app to control Sonos," the statement said.

"Alexa Voice Control and the Google Assistant on Sonos are currently experiencing some technical issues," Sonos wrote in an earlier tweet, directing users to a Sonos Status page that confirmed the company was indeed experiencing issues. 

Spotify and Alexa controls were classified on the page as experiencing a "major outage," while Google Assistant was listed as a partial outage. 

CNET confirmed the issue in testing and when requesting a song via Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant it resulted in the assistant saying that it could not find the speaker. However, CNET found other functions did work, including asking for the weather or controlling a Chromecast device. 

Originally published May 15, 2:31 p.m. ET. 

Update, 1:56 p.m.: Adds comment from Sonos.