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Amazon's Alexa experiences widespread outage

Users in several US cities report little assistance from the voice assistant.

Steven Musil Night Editor / News
Steven Musil is the night news editor at CNET News. He's been hooked on tech since learning BASIC in the late '70s. When not cleaning up after his daughter and son, Steven can be found pedaling around the San Francisco Bay Area. Before joining CNET in 2000, Steven spent 10 years at various Bay Area newspapers.
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Alexa, what's up?

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Amazon's Alexa wasn't being very helpful Wednesday afternoon for many users across the US.

Instead of serving up the usual music, news or weather information on request, the voice assistant and smart home gadget appeared stumped for users in several US cities, including New York, Boston and San Francisco. The outage appeared to have begun around 4:45 p.m. PT, based on user reactions on Twitter.

When asked to perform a task, she responded with: "Sorry. I'm having trouble. Please try in a little while."

The issue was resolved by 5:30 p.m.

"This afternoon we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers' ability to interact with the service," an Amazon spokesperson said. "The Alexa service is now operating normally."

The problem emerged just hours after Sonos confirmed that users were having trouble playing Spotify via Alexa and Google Assistant after an an outage. 

Originally published May 15, 5:08 p.m. PT. 
Update, 5:40 p.m.: Adds Amazon statement.