Alexa offline

[Maff]

This morning my Echo is unable to respond to any commands. Simply says 'something went wrong' or 'I don't know how to help you with that'. I've re set it up, but repeatedly it says in the App that Echo is offline. I'm an ex technician & I've checked connectivity & this is fine. I'm wondering if many Amazon echo servers are down. Anyone else having problems? I'm in the UK, and right now the US is asleep. The timing is interesting, just as the new Alexa provision for the new fire TV goes live. Hopefully it will come on again later. 

[Maff]

Now echo is back online, but Pandora and Iheartradio/TuneIn are still not working. Connected home stuff is very slow or doesn't work. I tried calling Amazon to see if the problem is there end. They had a message saying they are experiencing high call volumes (in the very early morning hours US time) and when I persisted trying to get through all I got was a message saying they are having technical problems during an upgrade and can't answer the call. I guess they will sort it out soon enough.

[RKnudsen]

It is not for me The indicator LED says it is connected (which means only to my local wifi) but there are no services available. I just asked for the weather and it said that Accuweather was under the weather right now.
They should have a service availability page where one can find up- and downtimes.

[Maff]

Seems to have gotten worse again for me too. Now even the alexa app states it is offline. Reports dribbling in from other folk on Twitter saying similar. Did see a report saying Amazon instant video was down, but mine in the UK seems fine.

[Jamanix]

Same problem here.  Can answer simple questions like "How many days until Christmas?"  but most everything else doesn't work.  Won't play music.  Tried hard reset and resetting wifi info but it won't connect.  Echo app keeps saying offline also.

[Deane Johnson]

Same here.  Sporadic response earlier, now just the red circle of death.  It's wide spread enough that it has to be on Amazon's end.  No need to look at your local network for the problem.

[Maff]

Mine has started to work again. Now controlling my wemos and playing Pandora again. App is online too.

[Gorilla Brazil]

I had the same issues here, but now everything seems to be good, finally.

[jwlv]

This is probably a planned outage as Maff said they might be doing upgrades for the new Fire TV enhancements.
Early Sunday mornings is usually a good time for companies to do stuff like this.
I just woke up about 30 minutes ago and didn't know anything happened until I read the forums.

[jwlv]

I just found out it wasn't a planned upgrade.
Here's the word from The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/20/aws_database_outage/

Amazon's Web Services (AWS) have been hit by a monster outage affecting the company's cloudy systems, bringing many sites down with it in the process.

The service disruption has hit AWS customers including Netflix, Tinder and IMDb, as well as Amazon's Instant Video and Books websites.

The outage may also explain Airbnb's current service woes. Airbnb is an AWS customer.

At time of publication, Amazon had coughed to data faults being reported on multiple services at its North Virginia US-EAST-1 site – which is the company's oldest public-cloud facility.

Some of the online retail giant's cloudy services were having a miserable Sunday.

It said that AWS services including CloudWatch (a monitoring system for the apps that run on the platform), Cognito (a service that saves mobile data) and DynamoDB (the company's NoSQL database) were all having a bit of a sit down today.

Amazon said it was recovering from the database blunder, but as part of the fix the company was forced to throttle APIs to recover the service.

In its most recent update about DynamoDB, Amazon said: "The metadata service is now stable and we are actively working on removing throttles."

Happy Sunday, everybody! ®

[Maff]

Ffs..  More problems today. Now my Echo won't play any music. Seems to have disconnected from Iheartradio & Pandora. TuneIn says unavailable also. Amazon not covering themselves in glory following their new product announcements!

[altjx]

I just registered on this forum to ask/report the same issue. This is the first time I've experienced this issue.

[renegade600]

I pity anyone who uses their echo as an alarm clock that morning they had the outage.  That is the disadvantage of having everything on the cloud. 

[jwlv]

I'm pretty sure that Echo has an internal clock so that it will still work when there's no internet connection.
I can't test it right now, but if anyone wants to try it let us know your results.

For the test, the Echo must be connected to the internet when you set the alarm.
e.g. "Alexa, set the alarm for 6:30pm"
Turn off or unplug your router/modem.
Wait till 6:30pm (or the time you set for the alarm) and see if the alarm sounds.

Cheers!