Amazon Alexa users report inability to control lights & speakers

Amazon’s Alexa users seem to be experiencing a bug that is not allowing them to control a group of devices.

Update: Amazon has confirmed the outage, and its spokesperson said, “Yesterday, we had a brief issue that impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service. The Alexa service is now operating normally.“

Smart home devices, especially the ones that can be controlled using your voice, are extremely helpful. However, the experience can go downhill when things break down.

Many Echo Speakers and smart display users report that they cannot control a group of smart devices using their voice. Various users took to Reddit to voice their concerns.

According to the Amazon Echo subreddit complaints, Alexa could control individual lights. Yet, when asked to turn a group of lights on or off, it wouldn’t budge and kept claiming, “Group name doesn’t support that” in response to the command.

For some users who tried to control a group of devices, especially lights, Alexa responded, “Sorry, I didn’t find a device or group named lights.” For some, the Alexa’s error message was “A few things share the name lights, which do you mean,” “This room doesn’t support that,” “Server is not responsive,” and “Device is not responding.”

Removing the lights individually and adding them back to the group also didn’t resolve the problem. That said, this problem seems to be limited to voice controls, as turning the groups off and on via the app seems to work seamlessly.

There’s no fix in sight right now

Going by the number of users responding to such posts on Reddit, the issue is widespread. However, there needs to be more clarity on how anyone could find a fix.

Some users said that restarting devices worked, albeit temporarily, and it didn’t seem to work for everyone, either.

A user suggested that the “whole Echo system seems to be having issues.” Interestingly, DownDetector hints that Amazon Alexa was down for many users for a period, and seems to be up now.

Amazon has yet to comment on the smart device issues.