Alexa Hits Snooze On Basic Functions As Alarms And Timers KO'd In UK Outage

Amazon's Alexa is on the fritz, bungling alarms and timers and leaving some UK users trapped in an endless wake-up call.

Reports from outage tracker DownDetector show a surge of complaints from UK users on Thursday. The complaints started to roll in at around 0800 local time, right as many morning alarms were blaring and, for some, refusing to be silenced.

Reddit is already awash with grumbles, some from folks who've had to yank the plug on their Echo to stop the racket. One poster said this worked – at least until they powered it back on and the alarm picked up where it left off.

"I'm about to throw my Alexa at the wall, it is driving me insane especially because I know I have another alarm in 18 minutes," one Reddit user groans. Another claimed the glitch made them rock up to work an hour late after Alexa failed to deliver their usual morning wake-up call.

Another user described trying to cancel alarms through the Alexa app only to be greeted with: "Unable to cancel alarms at this time, please try again later." They added that even scheduled wake-ups they'd long since deleted were still going off as if nothing had happened.

Alexa users, including us here at The Register, attempting to schedule an alarm are met with the unhelpful response: "Sorry, there was a problem setting your alarm."

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The gripes aren't limited to timers and alarms. Some users also report that reminders and routines have gone on strike, suggesting this isn't just a case of a few unlucky devices misbehaving, but a broader backend issue.

Another reckoned the borkage had also silenced their Blink doorbell notifications, which The Reg can verify: a user right here in Vulture Central says his Echo Screens have stopped telling him when someone's pressing the buzzer.

So far, Amazon has kept schtum on the cause of the meltdown and has yet not responded to The Register's questions, leaving smart home owners to wonder how something as fundamental as telling the time can go so badly wrong.

Given the number of simultaneous reports, the problem likely lies in Alexa's cloud services rather than individual hardware. But until Amazon confirms what's gone wrong and pushes a fix, users are having to resort to old-school solutions: kitchen timers, phone alarms, or good old-fashioned wristwatches. ®