Amazon Echo customers face issues in Europe

Thomson Reuters

(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc's Echo smart speakers faced outages in the U.K. and some other European countries on Wednesday, according to outage tracker Downdetector.com.

The website logged https://downdetector.co.uk/problems/amazon-alexa/map hundreds of reports about the issue with the speakers, which are powered by Amazon's voice-controlled assistant Alexa. The reports started surfacing at about 8 am UK time on Wednesday.

"This morning we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers' ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally," Amazon said in a statement.

Alexa allows Echo owners to search the web, find out the latest news, check weather reports, play music and even turn on the light.

Last week, Amazon launched new Echo devices with more powerful audio, in a bid to remain ahead of rivals Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc's Google in the nascent category for voice-controlled gadgets.

(Reporting by Arjun Panchadar in Bengaluru; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)

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