Contact not available for Alexa Calling

[mwittkopp89]

Hello,

My wife and I have several various Echo devices throughout our house.  One of the things we like to do with them is talk to our parents who live in a different state.  Recently, our families are unable to call us, when they call it says the contact is not available.  When I try to call my wife either using the phone or the show, it also tells me that she is unavailable and its the same for my wife if she tries to call me.  We are able to call out to our friends and family but not able call each other and our friends and family are unable to call us.  I was on the phone with Alexa Support yesterday for about an hour with no luck.  We tried resetting the devices and re-enabling calling. Both without any luck. We also confirmed that calling is enabled on all of our devices.  We have a 2 year old who loves to listen to music on the show and we weren't sure if she manage to select some sort of option to make us unavailable but looking over the options it doesn't appear so.

We have two echo show 2's, one show 5, one original show and a few other original echos and dots.  The issue seems to be occurring with all of the devices. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[jwlv]

All Echo devices used to ship with drop-in, calls, and communications turned ON by default. Lately, it's been OFF by default. I don't know if Amazon changed anything to existing customers' Echos, but you may want to check your communications settings to make sure they are what you expect.

Open your Alexa app and go to Settings. Select your Alexa device and go to Communications. Verify which contacts can or cannot call or drop-in on you. You need to do this for each and every one of your Echo devices.

[Wickwart]

I think we figured this out and I hope it's not too late to post my theory here.  I haven't tested this completely but it sounds reasonable.
I just got an echo show 8 for my blind and 92 year old dad who is in assisted living.  He has no ability to call us with a regular landline so we both wanted to drop in and visually check on him as well as get him the weather, news and some entertainment especially with being restricted due to the covid lockdowns.  We have to make the words for calling us very very memorable and simple too or he won't be able to remember or use them correctly.  Therefore we are changing the wake up name to "computer" to make it more familiar.  So we put both my and my sisters cell and home landline numbers in his contacts.  I have the Alexa app on my cell phone but we haven't put it on my sister's yet.  In each contact we put two numbers and labeled them home and mobile.  When I instruct Alexa to call me at my home number it tries then says "contact not available".  When I ask it to call either of my sisters numbers it does whatever I ask.  If I ask it to simply call me it will dial the cell number without asking which number to use (It defaults to the cell number).  Now, the only difference in the two contact profiles is that my sister does not have the app on her phone.  It seems therefore that the Echo will always default to the cell number associated with the app and will refuse to call any other numbers for the person IF they have one of the numbers associated with Alexa.  Sooooo.  We got around it this way:  we made a separate contact for the home phone calling it something that is familiar to dad "our last name" as the first name of the contact and "residence" as the last name of the contact.  This worked beautifully.  I hope this helps someone sort out the "Contact not available" glitch.