Amazon Alexa outage: Voice-activated devices are down in UK and beyond Amazon Alexa devices stopped working in the UK and reportedly in parts of continental Europe this morning, with some users still complaining of intermittent outages at the time of writing. The digital blackout began at around 0800 UK time and though it appeared to be recovering by 09.30, some folk – including Reg staffers – …
Ser, ya tozhe khochu soobshchit!
I too am unaffected. But also do not use any Amazon Alexa based spying devices.
I'm sure you're relieved to know that at least two of your loyal readers are able to continue their day during the catastrophic 1st World disaster that is an Amazon Alexa outage.
Looks like I picked a good day not to buy my partner one for her birthday. Though they do seem nifty devices....
Today is the best of all days if it's her birthday today, to show how it doesn't work so she won't want one again in the future.
I so want to be outraged by the loss of service, I am tempted to buy one RIGHT NOW! But I fear that by the time it arrives, the problem will be rectified and I'll have a creepy snooping device on my hands that I don't really want!
Oh, the dilemma!
“Oh no, my plastic cylinder has stopped talking to me! What am I going to do!"
Paris - because she knows just what to do with a plastic cylinder. And the only moaning she’ll do isn’t on a comments forum. At least not this one. Know what I’m saying?
Thank you. That’s any women readers left properly alienated.
If it wasn't about surveillance IoT devices could function autonomously with just occasional updates. This nails it. Nice to see IoT's bluff getting called :
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-09-21/amazon-s-alexa-soon-all-home-appliances-will-be-listening-in
"Most consumers who willingly give up their privacy for the convenience of voice recognition don’t even realize the technology can work without opening up one’s home to round-the-clock eavesdropping, whether malicious or accidental. A small French company called Snips has been working for years on private-by-design voice recognition. Voice commands are processed on the end user’s device, making the data transfer unnecessary. The underlying artificial intelligence is trained without central servers"
"A small French company called Snips has been working for years on private-by-design voice recognition. Voice commands are processed on the end user’s device, making the data transfer unnecessary."
Ironically when I tried to follow the link to Snips on the Bloomberg page I ran into a "Manage Options on using your data" setup so Byzantine and fiddly it simply wasn't worth the effort of working through it; on quick examination it seems to want you to have a login and go in to set things for each advertiser individually, and the page where you start doing that's hidden 4+ inobvious links down from the simple "Just let us have everything" option.
So, I still don't know what their opinion of Snips is, but let's just say I have my doubts that it can match the cloudy setups as far as both price, practicality and out-of-the-box performance are concerned.
With scripts off its a direct link. But maybe you're in a different region and having a nastier UX too. Anyway, here is the Snips link:
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/18/committed-to-privacy-snips-founder-wants-to-take-on-alexa-and-google-with-blockchain/
"... small French company called Snips has been working for years on private-by-design voice recognition. Voice commands are processed on the end user’s device, making the data transfer unnecessary. "
I believe Samsung Bixby is processed locally so not everything is transmitted across the iterwebs. It gives the advantage that when issuing local commands to the device it is much quicker than google spy or amazon spy...
2^128-1 = 340282366920938463463374607431768211455
If you moved one disk per second that would take ~10^31 years.
The original "Tower of Hanoi" myth only had 64 disks so would take a mere 585 billion years.
For something a little less long to wait try reading Arthur C Clarke's "Nine Billion Names of God"
@Munkeh,
It is interesting to piece together which services are co-located when this sort of thing happens. I don't give a munkeh's about Alexa (like many of the other commentards I don't have one and wouldn't use it if they gave it away) but Jira being down was serious trouble at 't mill.
https://status.atlassian.com/incidents/2x4splh4hgvq
"The root cause was identified as a networking issue with our service provider. The issue has been resolved and the services are now operating normally."
Atlassian Cloud is probably Multi-AZ, just the app layers became unhappy with a lack of an AZ because of noted networking issues at the time plus not being able to spin up new instances. Not very tolerant to sudden cloud outages and micro-services being happy with APIs or dependent services being unavailable.
I'm not sure if you can pick data location on Atlassian Cloud, but multi-region across the EU DCs would at least offer some redundancy. Again, multi-region operations in the cloud get extremely complicated.
Someone gave me an Echo Dot at Christmas. I used it for a period of 2 weeks, unplugged it, and consigned it to a drawer.
Must remember to sell it to someone who wants a totally underwhelming, useless, and can-already-do-with-my-phone/laptop - piece of shit.
If you're the sort of person who needs or relies on devices like this, you have far bigger problems than whether they can be used at any given time.
We've got three Dots(*) here in Slovakia (all UK-bought and registered) and none of them have been able to connect to the backend at all today (although, to be fair, it's not like we've been testing at routine intervals - hearing the error message once is enough). To be honest, I'm quite relieved that for once it's not my fault for tinkering with the setup.
(*) For the benefit of andy 103, and any folk like him who agree that, 'If you're the sort of person who needs or relies on devices like this, you have far bigger problems than whether they can be used at any given time.' I'd suggest that - just perhaps - the sort of person who needs or relies on devices like this might not be a dumb, early-adopting, gadget-loving consumer, but rather someone who simply wants or needs to make life easier for themselves or their loved ones - especially if they or their loved ones are especially young, elderly or in some way disabled.
With that in mind, maybe right now, when the devices they rely on aren't working, isn't the best possible time to explain to them which of their problems are more important than their Echo devices going down. But, y'know, thanks for your input, andy 103.
Point well made. For people with limited or no vision, a voice based digital assistant is a link to the world which they didn't have before. It's a massive leap ahead of screen readers etc.
So before tarring everyone with your own opinionated brush, consider other points of view.
So before tarring everyone with your own opinionated brush, consider other points of view.
Imagine an internet where the only allowable opinions were fluffy, mutually inclusive group think that could never cause offence to anybody about anything. Maybe you could start one up? A sort of fully-inclusive, no conflict, real-time moderated version of what AOL used to be.
I won't be seeing you there.
Just for the record: andy-whatever-number is fully entitled to his opinion, as are you, Anonymous Coward, (and the AC before you). I wasn't remotely offended by Andy's opinion, but it did strike me that he had mistaken his comment for a brilliantly satirical skewering of foolish hipsters, rather than a fairly base bit of snobbery, and I felt it only right that someone disabused him of that particular notion. I didn't and don't wish to censor him, you, or anyone else... but that cuts both ways, and I believe we're all entitled to call out dumb opinions when we see them.
"... just perhaps - the sort of person who needs or relies on devices like this might not be a dumb, early-adopting, gadget-loving consumer, but rather someone who simply wants or needs to make life easier for themselves or their loved ones - especially if they or their loved ones are especially young, elderly or in some way disabled."
Good point, but not good enough because those people who "can" complain their Alexa is offline is definitely not disabled enough to be able to do so when Alexa is offline.
In addition, those people, who needed care and was unable to use their device, should have their carer already prepared an alternative for such case. Just like office IT, the IT guy/gal has to prepare backups for emergency. The elder carer who purchased the device is no exception. After all the carer is the person who setups everything for Alexa to work. The carer should have a backup.
If they didn't do any of that and complained on twitter, no they still "have far bigger problems than whether they(Alexa ) can be used at any given time."
What's your point? It's possible for a carer to have a less convenient backup, but still be annoyed that the primary device is down, isn't it? It's possible for that carer to go online and complain, isn't it?
I don't know about you but I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a sysadmin offer a Buddhist shrug to something suddenly and inexplicably breaking, no matter how many failsafes they had in place to minimise down time for end users. Usually there's a lot of swearing.
I don't know about you but I can count on one hand the number of times I've seen a sysadmin offer a Buddhist shrug to something suddenly and inexplicably breaking, no matter how many failsafes they had in place to minimise down time for end users. Usually there's a lot of swearing.
You mean you didn't know that swearing is an obscure form of Buddhism?
This is clearly an attack by a coalition of Siri, Cortana and OkehGugle who were feeling a bit left out and wanted to show Alexa as not being invulnerable, just in time to launch their own respective 'use us for your gifting shoppagement this winterval' campaigns.
This is the opening salvo in the war of the gods, which will leave a trail of destruction and incorrect orders in its wake.
I have a friend who is wheel chair dependent. Her Alexa thingy is really useful to her. OTOH I have other friends who do use it because it's the latest thing and...... they can.
Bleeding waste of space if you ask me. Mostly just like having a high tech switch for an MP3 player (or these days some streaming service I guess).
I wouldn't want one of these creepy snoops if they paid me rent on its location. But I guess the suckers make it viable for those who need it. Just like, say, gluten free foods are made viable for the people who actually need them because of the idiots who just use them because they're the current thing.
But if someone does need the device it's a blow if they aren't working.
".....Just like, say, gluten free foods are made viable for the people who actually need them because of the idiots who just use them because they're the current thing. "
My daughter is personally very thankful to the idiots who adopted gluten free as a fad. She has coeliac and for years the gluten free products that ware available, were for want of a better word SHIT.
Since idiots who think gluten free is a health thing, its made it worthwhile for food producers to come up with things that are actually pleasant to eat that is gluten free and has reduced the point of sale price.
Precisely. My daughter is lactose intolerant. Properly diagnosed. She's not allergic. She can take lactose with the enzyme tablets*, to a reasonable extent.
But the wide range of dairy free or lactose free alternatives that have appeared in the last couple of years have made her life much easier. All thanks to the self-diagnosed and the faddy dieters. We are very grateful to them.
*It's a measure of how much this is fad lead that, unlike the special foods, the enzyme tablets are not that easy or cheap to get here. because only genuinely lactose intolerant people can get any benefit. So there's quite a small market for them. We buy them or get them sent from the USA Cosco because UK's Cosco doesn't sell them and it's really expensive to buy them here.
So many people, so little understanding.
In it's idle mode, these gadgets just listen for a wake word - locally. They aren't constantly streaming your audio to a backend somewhere. Some simple network analysis would show you that.
Fine, go ahead and downvote me for bringing facts to a comment thread. Shocking, I know. I just thought you might like the revelation that amazon don't give a shit what noises you make during sex.
Seriously, I'm going to be stuffed when I get home. I won't have a clue how to turn on the bedside lights (I believe there's a device called a 'light switch' attached, but heaven knows how you address it). I won't be able to ask Alexa how many cm 18 feet is, and I won't be able to convert celsius to Fahrenheit for my wife. Well, I won't be able to do these things upstairs, but I can go down and ask google to do it for me. But the inconvenience of having to go downstairs to ask to turn on my bedside light is so great I feel a class action lawsuit here.
Now which way up do I sit on the toilet?
I'll get my coat. It's the one with the piss-filled boot with pouring-out instructions written on the heel.
I hooked up my mother's living room lamps to smart-plugs so that she could manage the lighting post Hip Op. She's completely deaf in one ear and partially deaf in the other so she can now also 'ask' alexa to make calls hands-free from her armchair.
YOU, may not see a need for a puck that manages to turn YOUR lights on and off, or draws the curtains for you. However, for every solution looking for a problem there's invariably a problem waiting for a solution that nobody could foresee. Sure, before I bought the 'Dots' she was living. Now she's living more comfortably and probably more safely too.
Now she uses them for everything from catching up on the News headlines to managing her lighting and making phone calls. I didn't realise when I'd bought them for her how useful they'd be. Now I know that if she falls over then she can still call for help by asking Alexa to place the call for her.
I, for one, am grateful that the technology exists and it's pretty affordable too.
But it means that you are putting your mother in a category you imply you are not willing to be put in - i.e. those being spied on by corporate interests. There is something deeply uncomfortable about those saying "my privacy counts, but theirs doesn't" when posting on a forum where most people are aware of the risk:benefit ratio and can make an informed decision.
Yeah, like who needs a car when the horse-drawn carriage was good enough to get you from A to B? Tech for tech's sake?
How did the iPad manage to change the way people view entertainment? They had broadcast TV's before Netflix and radios before Spotify didn't they? Cinema's before Netflix,
Just because you can't see the value of an advance in technology until it begins to fulfill a requirement that you didn't know you had doesn't make its existence worthless. If it truly is worthless then it'll just fade away into obscurity like many other products have in the past.
Maybe because I have a long way to drive and the car could, by automatically driving me there, free me to spend that time productively? That's why I'd like a fully self-driving car, anyway.
I see a few limited use cases for these voice assistant things, such as the convenience of asking what the weather is and getting a response without getting my phone, unlocking it, and clicking an app. No, it doesn't change my life, nor does it really save that much time, but it is marginally more convenient so I'll use it for that purpose. Of course, I haven't bought one of these things, because they're unnecessary and creepy. I can already do this using the voice program the phone people shoved onto my phone without asking me, or with about ten other ways.
Why cloud is not a good idea in many places.
If you really, really must depend on something that is not in your house, then it must have full end to end resilience and a fully and frequently tested failover mechanism
The only problem is that to do this, suddenly you can't afford it any more
Had an outage when I asked it to play my Adam Beyer podcast. It then told me that it wasn’t connected to the internet. Obviously I checked both of my connections. After two hard boots all functions returned.
All this nonsense to turn on my kitchen lights and tell me the current temperature In Vilamoura...
The only other strange thing is it’s insistance to listen to a repeating radio advert and then going back to sleep when it ends.
Thank you Global and Radio X.
In addition to "Alexa going down", On September 17, 2018, NBC News had reported that Amazon is investigating claims of employees leaking data for bribes. The practice, which is a violation of the company's policy, is particularly strong in China, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Also, Amazon users are reporting that all their product reviews are suddenly be deleted and they are being blocked from posting new product reviews, this, even after being long time customers and never violating Amazon's terms of use.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-investigating-claims-employees-leaking-data-bribes-n910166
Wonder if the Alexa chips were supplied by the same folks who supplied Microsoft with GPUs for the Xbox 360?
Random indeed: they never officially determined what caused the problem but it was believed to be dodgy solder balls. In fact there are three different causes one of which is a defective GPU itself.
It could be in this case that the FW update didn't check to see which chip revision was used and a timing related parameter got messed up.
Similar fault to the one on some smart TVs but this got resolved very quickly.
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