One of my older Echo Dots recently started acting up. I had been unplugged and boxed away since our move in the spring, however it worked fine before we put it away. Yet now every time I asked it for anything it would start to reply then make a loud popping noise and would shutdown or restart. Sometimes you might be able to get a command or two in but otherwise it did this every time.

My initial digging gave me a few suggestions. One was to make sure I updated the device, so I did, and the issue continued. I tried a different USB cable and charging block, still no luck. Other suggestions included plugging it into an external speaker (which admittedly I didn’t try) to determine if the speaker itself was at fault. But none of them suggested what actually ended up being the solution in my case and which I discovered by accident, so I just wanted to share it for any others who might be in the same boat.

It was the surface it was placed on — glass. I had set it up in our bathroom so my wife could listen to music while getting ready or if I wanted to listen to music or a podcast while in the shower. But the only spot that made sense to place it was in a little glass shelf protruding from the mirror. Once I moved it from there to on top of the toilet’s tank the problem completely went away. Then when I placed it back on the glass shelf it returned. So there’s something about the glass surface, maybe the way it vibrates, that causes the Echo Dot 2nd Gen to reboot.