Amazon has confirmed its Alexa virtual assistant service suffered an outage in the UK and mainland Europe but is now back to normal. The Downdetector website reported a wave of Alexa outages in the UK and across Europe on Friday morning at about 7am GMT, with the reports spread throughout the UK. An Amazon spokesperson said: “This morning we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally.” Many users said they had been left unable to wake their voice-activated Amazon Echo smart devices, with some seeing a ring of red lights and a message asking them to try again later or that “something went wrong”. Others complained on social media of being unable to use their Alexa-powered gadgets to play music or radio, access alarms and reminders, or carry out other daily tasks. According to Downdetector, the reports of outages peaked at about 8.20am and had fallen sharply by 9.30am. In December last year, several Amazon services – including its website, Prime Video and applications that use Amazon Web Services (AWS) – went down for thousands of users. At the time the e-commerce company said the outage was because of problems related to the application programming interface (API), which is a set of protocols for building and integrating application software.