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Is your Amazon Echo, Alexa, or Ring down today? You aren’t alone

By Patrick Hearn Published February 11, 2022

If you’ve tried to use your Alexa or Ring device this morning only to receive no response, don’t worry — it’s not just you. Amazon Web Services, the cloud-computing backbone of Amazon.com and large portions of the internet, is experiencing outages this morning that are affecting thousands of users.

But it’s not just Amazon-powered smart devices. There are thousands of outage reports for Disney+, as well as games like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, League of Legends, and others. You might notice that your Alexa smart assistant doesn’t respond, or just says she doesn’t know what went wrong. Even using your Alexa app to activate smart devices might not work.

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The problem seems to be largely focused on the eastern section of the United States. According to the

AWS Service Health Dashboard

, the root cause of the problem has been identified and the team is working toward a fix. They’ve already begun to see some signs of recovery, but haven’t given an ETA on when to expect service to be fully restored.

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What can you do if your smart lights won’t turn on? Power cycle them. This will at least turn them on, although you won’t have smart control over your lights or any other device until AWS has been repaired. These outages can last for hours or even days, but most commonly, the problem — especially one that seems regional like this particular outage — will be resolved by the end of the day.

It isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. In 2018, hundreds of users worldwide reported Alexa outages. Sometimes glitches or a server malfunction can bring down services, but Amazon tends to have them restored quickly. Until that happens, you may have to turn your lights on the old-fashioned way.

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Patrick Hearn writes about smart home technology like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, smart light bulbs, and more. If it's a…

Smart Home

The most common Echo Show problems and how to fix them

Amazon Echo Show 10.

If you're looking to add a smart display to your home, the Amazon Echo Show is a great option. Bringing the best of Alexa into the visual realm, the Echo Show allows you to tap into real-time video from your home's smart security system, have video calls with friends and family using Alexa's Drop In feature, stream from Hulu and Prime Video, run photo slideshows, and so much more.

But glitches happen, and the Echo Show is not without its small trail of troubles. Fortunately, many of these issues have straightforward fixes. In this deep dive, we'll be taking a look at the most common Echo Show problems and how you can fix them.
Echo Show screen is flickering
This issue has been with the Echo Show since the first-generation model. What we're talking about are pulsating horizontal lines stretching across the screen. Sometimes, the malfunction appears closer to the bottom of the display, where Alexa's indicator is, or up and down the entire display. Some Echo Show owners experience this infrequently, others all the time. If your own Show is flickering, there are a few things you can try.

Smart Home

What to do if your Amazon Alexa app is not working

Alexa app on phone.

If you use Amazon Alexa and its quit responding to you, you may have realized by now that there are a ton of thing that could be causing that problem. One big issue is that the Amazon Alexa app itself has potentially shut down communication with you. Instead of getting overwhelmed by the all of the possibilities, letting your Amazon Echo devices sit there useless, and feeling despair, try an ordered list of potential fixes to get things started.

While there are a lot of different reasons for an Alexa to quite responding, if you go through the following techniques one by one, you'll certainly get a resolution to any problems you might be having with the Alexa app. We'll walk you through everything from updating your Alexa device to contacting Amazon for advanced help if no simple fix will work.
Check for a software update

Smart Home

How to use all Amazon Alexa alarm clock features

Woman in bed looking toward Echo Dot.

Amazon Alexa is a powerful voice assistant. Along with dishing out commands to your smart home devices or updating you on the latest news, Alexa can function as a pretty robust alarm clock. From setting reminders for later in the day to waking you up with music, there's a lot of functionality packed into the assistant.

Before you can start using all these Alexa alarm clock features, you'll need to know how to activate them. And unless you know exactly how to trigger the actions, it can be tricky to figure out how it all works. Here's a comprehensive look at how to use all Amazon Alexa alarm clock features, including setting a one-time alarm, setting alarms on connected devices, and triggering a recurring alarm that activates with music.
A comprehensive list of all Alexa alarm clock voice commands
We'll examine the best commands in detail later on, but here's a look at every Alexa voice command that triggers an alarm (remember to say "Hey, Alexa" before giving each line):

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