Amazon said it sold "millions more" of its devices this holiday season compared to last year. The Echo Dot was the best-seller, followed by the Fire TV Stick 4K and standard Echo smart speaker.
In addition to the newer Echo devices, the Amazon Fire TV, Fire tablet and Kindle remained popular and also sold in the millions, Amazon said. As usual, the company did not release any exact sales figures. Amazon said "tens of millions" of new Prime subscriptions were started over the holidays as well.
To give an indication of the growing scale of its voice-controlled digital assistant Alexa, Amazon said there was an eight-fold increase in the number of reminders given by Alexa, and Alexa was used twice as much on Fire TV devices as a year ago.
The large volume of new devices appears to have put a strain on Alexa's servers, as users reported problems in Europe, the Guardian reports. Late morning on 25 December, Alexa told some users: "Sorry, I’m having trouble understanding you right now." Amazon said on Twitter that some users in Europe "had intermittent problems", but these were resolved after a couple hours.
