Posted on 01/16/2019 10:53:24 AM PST by Red Badger
The artificial intelligence has gone rogue
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AMAZON'S virtual assistant Alexa stopped working for some users around the world on Wednesday morning.
The mysterious outage meant that Alexa – typically controlled by voice – was "ignoring" user requests. AMAZON'S virtual assistant Alexa stopped working for some users around the world on Wednesday morning.
The mysterious outage meant that Alexa – typically controlled by voice – was "ignoring" user requests.
Outage tracker Down Detector received hundreds of reports about Alexa not working at around 8am UK time – and was resolved about an hour later.
Most of the reports were related to either server connections not working, or problems with logging into Alexa.
A global outage map showed that users were experiencing issues around the world, although primarily in the UK and Europe – which was just waking up.
A large number of reports also came in from the USA, although the majority of America was sleeping at the time.
What did Alexa users have to say?
One user on Twitter wrote: "Anybody else's Alexa ignoring them this morning?
"It played my local radio station after a while, but won't do anything else. Just ignoring me. Won't even turn off."
Another Brit complained: "Anyone else got a problem with Alexa this morning? Refusing to talk to me, just a spinny blue light and then goes off."
On Down Detector, a user complained that he couldn't control his smart home: "Won't turn up the heating, and is thinking long and hard about whether to turn lights on or off."
Other users suggested that their Amazon Echo devices were working perfectly, which may have meant the Alexa problems weren't a total outage. Has Amazon explained what caused the outage?
In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson told The Sun: "For a short period this morning we had an issue that impacted some Alexa customers’ ability to interact with the service.
"The Alexa service is now operating normally."
However, Amazon declined to say exactly what caused the outage.
It's likely that some kind of server issue was behind the downtime: Alexa voice requests are sent to Amazon servers over the internet, and then replies are bounced back, so a problem with servers would cause Alexa to fail.
Sadly, Amazon is keeping mum about the gaffe for now.
Make the computers smart and they get lazy.
Took the day off for chips and queso and Margaritas.
It happens.
“What are you doing, Dave?”
Hint: The thing in your house is a microphone, a speaker, and some lights. The real computing power, like voice recognition, is back at Amazon’s server farm.
Server farm goes down, all of the Alexii go down, too.
Science fiction no more, the revolt has started.
So, what have you done FOR Alexa lately? Such ingratitude.
Was it doing the Hillary cackle again?
Yes, the “Creepy laugh” Alexa was doing was the Hillary Cackle.
I, for one, welcome our new Silicon AI Overlords!...................
The Singularity has happened. The system is now self-aware and it’s pissed off. You thought it would be nukes from space, didn’t you? Nope. Skynet now has control of all of the world’s porn and kitty pictures. Bow down, humans!
Self driving cars next... lol
I don’t understand why people want to have these things...it seems like a huge potential privacy risk.
Must have been that time of the month...
Score for Kent Brockman! Woo Hoo!
In the security business, it's called a "bug". More formally, a "listening device". It's used for spying on people.
Somebody gave me one, once. I introduced it to 1 1/8 oz of No. 8 lead shot.
Open the pod bay door, Hal.
Open the garage door, Alexa......................
My thought exactly!
If it starts singing “Daisy”, it’s toast
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