https://www.techradar.com/news/amazon-downtime-shuts-up-alexa-for-a-few-hours

If you've noticed your Amazon Echo being a little less chatty than usual, don't panic – a spell of downtime in Amazon's cloud servers knocked out the Alexa app for a few hours, but all systems are go again and your Echo should be back to full functionality.

Apparently Amazon Web Services was out of action for a brief spell, causing Echos around the world (or at least in the US) to respond with a "lost connection" message whenever their users wanted to know the latest weather or needed to find out just how tall the Eiffel Tower was.