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Amazon Freetime Unlimited Users Report Service Outages

For the past couple weeks Amazon’s child-centered subscription service has been having a few problems.

Amazon Freetime Unlimited is supposed to provide access to a selection of apps videos, audiobooks, and games for a low monthly fee, but numerous users are reporting that when they open the Amazon FU app on their Kindle Fire tablet, instead of content they get an error message saying "Oops! Something went wrong".

Here’s one report from the comment section of a post that reported a similar outage a couple years ago:

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 so I called Amazon who, after going through some initial confusion about what I wanted got exact thing I heard from commenter in 2016.  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.

There are many additional reports on the Amazon device forums from frustrated paying customers. According to The eBook Evanglist blog, the problem seems to have started for most people after the most recent update for Amazon Freetime and the latest Fire OS update. Sometimes, rebooting temporarily fixes the problem, but it keeps coming back. Amazon is recommending a factory reset (which does NOT seem to be fixing the problem).

Alas, there doesn’t appear to be a fix at this time, but there are a couple work-arounds. Some users are reporting that rebooting their tablet fixes the issue for a time, while other users report that going into the settings and clearing the Freetime app’s cache made it work again.

If you are having this problem then you should try one trick and then the other while waiting for Amazon to patch the system.

TBH, I do not expect Amazon to fix this permanently; the Amazon Freetime service has had similar issues several times over the past couple years, and that points to a fundamental problem with the system itself.

Amazon was contacted before this post was published, and has not responded.

eBook Evangelist

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Comments


steve December 7, 2018 um 11:31 pm

I found a sure fire fix, no pun intended, 1) cancel auto renew for Freetime, 2) get a non Amazon device, 3) install google play, 4) activate parental controls. Presto, Amazon Fire problem solved.


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