Skip to main content

Amazon Freetime Now Causing Registration Issues on Kids Fire Tablets

fire kids tablet amazon 7 2015If your Kids Fire tablet suddenly de-registered itself or lost your data, you’re not alone, and it’s not your fault.

As Pocketables initially reported, and eBook Evangelist explained, some Kids Fire tablet owners are finding that their tablets have spontaneously lost registration info, as well as all details from the kid profiles.

Paul King laid out the situation, explaining that on Thursday his daughter’s Fire tablet:

told her to sign into the Amazon app store with an Amazon account.

She handed it to me. There was no way in the child profile to do this (no kb, no page transition to a settings page,) so I switched to my profile which usually says “Paul’s Fire” or some such. This time it said “Owner” and listed no child profiles. Something was afoot.

There was no account there. I logged back in. Maggie’s profile reappeared, we switched back to it only to discover that every game she’d played was gone. Now normally this is not a huge deal, but the Amazon Fire Kids Edition does not have a whole lot of processing power so installing an app takes a while. Maggie started six apps installing that she likes, and we put the thing away after it was evident that even stopping the install of all of them but that one app was going to take a few minutes.

At first glance this looks like it might be a repeat of the de-registration problem from April, but a discussion thread on the Kindle support forums suggests that the current problem is focused on just Fire tablets used by kids.

Several dozen parents commented on Thursday that their kid’s tablet was misbehaving. Most of the comments were of the "me, too" variety, but several offered specifics:

All 4 of my kids tablets are down right now also. The kindle won’t stay registered, and after putting in my login info and changing to my kids profile there is an error message and the kindle deregisters itself again. We are also freetime users.

Freetime is Amazon’s name for the managed child accounts on Fire tablets. Not to be confused with Amazon Freetime Unlimited, the paid subscription service, Freetime lets parents set up accounts for their children which limit access to apps, ebooks, and the web.

And now it would appear that Freetime is misbehaving on Amazon’s servers. While we don’t know the exact cause, there were a couple parents who said that Amazon CS had said that this was a known issue.

Just finished with chat. It’s a known issue and the developers are working on it, but no time frame as to when it will be fixed. He submitted a follow up so he is supposed to call me when it’s fixed. I highly suggested that they extend our Freetime if it stays down for long.

No new comments were left after Friday, suggesting that the problem has been fixed.

Are you still having problems?

Similar Articles


Comments


Kristin Peto July 16, 2016 um 10:38 am

We’ve just discovered this problem today. I have a very disappointed kid.

Nate Hoffelder July 16, 2016 um 10:42 am

I’m sorry to hear that.


Amanda Dafoe August 18, 2016 um 9:00 am

We only gave our kindles to the kids in late July (30th). This problem came up in the last week (Aug 11). My son couldn’t wait for me to investigate and claimed he’d fixed the problem. When i looked at his kindle this morning, it listed 2 profiles for people we have never heard of! This is concerning and I’m not sure there is any real reason to think this could happen, but I wonder about the security of these devices. Could another person hack into my child’s device? Was this simply a server screw up? I deleted all info from the device and will try re-registering it from re-boot to see if this fixes the problem.


Jordan March 24, 2017 um 7:38 am

Any updates on this? Just happened to us and I cant find answers or solutions anywhere..

Nate Hoffelder March 24, 2017 um 3:22 pm

They said they fixed it.

Apparently not.


Daniel Phillips September 20, 2018 um 8:08 pm

I just found ours updated and now it doesnt load the kids app store. This is not cool.


Natasha September 21, 2018 um 5:17 pm

This just happened to ours too. This was a problem 2 years ago! What gives!


M. Daniels November 21, 2018 um 4:42 pm

Happened to us this morning. Is there ANY follow up info on this?

Nate Hoffelder November 22, 2018 um 8:23 am

no, sorry


Dan December 2, 2018 um 5:49 am

So fast forward 2 years- exact same scenario. I had no idea bout the events in 2016. My child would start to get an "oops!: screen on free time every time the screen woke up from sleep and basically after anything . It happens several times a day.

I pay for the premium service s I called Amazon who, after going through some initial confusion about what I wanted (you got to love these Indian call centers. Got exact thing I heard from commenter in 2016. Did I warp back? CS agent says it is a known issue and there is no timeframe for a fix. That must be the "we are not in the loop" canned response.
Naturally, I say= well, I shouldn’t have to pay for a service that is not working right? After checking, the answer was, "YES" I absolutely did need to pay for the faulty service. I said immediately "cancel it." I will re-enlist whenever they get their act together. I thought that was pretty bold though. "Yes, we know it doesn’t work and you cannot use your tablet computer because of it, but this level of incompetency doesn’t pay for itself you know." So I have canceled. Can’t believe they wouldn’t just forgive charge until it starts wok ag


Abigail July 2, 2019 um 8:16 am

I am a kid and my parents aren’t up yet. Fast forward to July 2019. I wake up and after my tablet doing system updates the night before all but some apps my dad put on there for me were gone. From the ENTIRE tablet.


Amanda Divine April 12, 2020 um 2:21 pm

The new Fire HD 10 tablet was just fine for my son he was using it just fine the other day now yesterday I go to turn it on for him and everything on his profile is gone I have no clue how to get it back and when I go into my account and look at his settings it says it all the games I switched over to the account are still there but on his profile there is nothing


Write a Comment