Outages
Hello Knights,
yesterday there was a major worldwide outage affecting the infrastructure provider Cloudflare. Many well-known online services were temporarily unreachable or showed error messages – and some of you were unable to use the Knight Manager skill or could only use it in a limited way.
What happened?
Cloudflare experienced a technical issue in its network system that prevented requests from reaching many services at all. Alexa connections were affected as well. For some players, this meant:
- Voice commands never reached our skill, which is why we couldn’t see any error messages on our side.
- Commands that needed to load sound or image files from cloud services were unable to retrieve those assets for a while. This resulted in empty or silent responses.
Is everything working again?
For most players, everything is back to normal.
A small number of players are still experiencing issues – but these are steadily decreasing.
What could still be causing problems?
Most likely DNS caching. During the outage, some routers, providers, or devices saved incorrect or incomplete DNS entries. Routers, ISPs, and Echo devices can keep these cached entries for several hours. As long as these old entries remain active, some devices may still be using the wrong route to reach our skill.
What you can try if the skill still isn’t working properly:
- Restart your router
- Unplug your Alexa device briefly
- Turn Wi-Fi off and on again
- On mobile devices: enable and disable airplane mode
Thank you for your patience. We understand how frustrating external outages can be. While our influence on this issue was and is very limited, we continue to keep a close eye on our systems.