If you’re wondering whether Amazon Alexa is down or if it’s just you, there’s an easy way to check. On the morning of 20 October, starting at around 8am BST, complaints of an Alexa outage began to appear.

At about 4:30PM ET on October 20, things seemed to be returning back to normal. Apps like Venmo and Lyft, which were either slow to respond or completely nonresponsive before, were appearing to behave smoothly.

Users of other companies relying on AWS for cloud infrastructure also reported difficulties accessing financial, trading, and messaging platforms, highlighting the widespread consequences of the incident.

If Alexa lights up but won't respond on your Alexa-compatible device, there could be a number of issues at play.

The new AI-powered capabilities primarily focus on a smart home assistant that can understand and use natural language, as well as comprehend, generate, and summarize descriptions of events within and around your home. The features are being added slowly, as part of a new opt-in early access program in the US and several other countries.