Alexa Skill - Unable to link the skill at this time. Please try again later

Hello everyone,

I’ve had Alexa running via developer.amazon; aws.amazon; and cloudflare (including their DNS registration) for about 10 months. Lately my daughter and friend said that Alexa occasionally says something like ‘Sorry I can’t do this at the moment, open the Alexa app and activate the skill again… Of course, this all worked when I was at home.

Yesterday I upgraded HA to the latest version, it was maybe 1 month old before. I then also got the message that I should reactivate the skill. So I let Alexa give me a wide berth and deactivated the skill and tried to reactivate it. Unfortunately, I didn’t succeed. The HA login window appears, but after logging in I get the message ‘Unable to link the skill at this time. Please try again later’.

If I enter an incorrect password, I get a message in the HA log about an incorrect login. If I enter the correct admin login data, I do not receive a log entry.

There are also no problems with https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/lambda/. The ‘Code’ → ‘Test’ tab provides me with all the devices that I have configured in HA. In the ‘Test’ → ‘Test’ tab, I also get no error message.

So I have no idea what the problem is. I couldn’t find anything in Cloudflare either. Except that at some point something was blocked by ‘Microsoft MSN Block from Ireland’. But this doesn’t happen at the times when I want to connect the skill. I don’t know much about Cloudflare, but I’ve seen a few firewalls in my lifetime and couldn’t find anything in the menu items that would indicate a problem.


A few things I have tried / checked to my knowledge, of course always followed by testing the skill connection:

  • Reinstalling the Alexa app on the iPhone where it worked.
  • Installation of the Alexa app on an iPad where Alexa was never installed.
  • Reinstallation of the Cloudflare add-on in HA
  • Creation of a second skill at https://developer.amazon.com/
  • Creation of a second function at https://eu-west-1.console.aws.amazon.com/lambda/
  • Test the newly created skill based on the configuration of the first skill
  • Creation of the longlive token for the user in HA, who was gone but still had the same key as in the initial configuration
  • Check in Cloudflare whether bots are on. (Was not)
  • Check whether anything is blocked by Amazon (apparently not, but I now know how I could block the requests via WAF–>User-defined rules so that a block entry could be output under Security-Analytics- Sampling logs).
  • For security reasons, the following rules for ‘This website’ are allowed under WAF-Tools:
  • ASN: AS14618 - Allow Alexa HA integration - Lambda Function (AS14618 Amazon.com, Inc.)
  • ASN AS16509 - Allow Alexa HA integration - iOS App (AS16509 AMAZON-02)
  • Searched in vain for how I could completely reset Alexa to factory settings.
  • HA restart of course
  • WLAN deactivated on the iPhone (Yes, the login screen for HA still appears in the Alexa app for the skill).
  • Backup back to the state before I tinkered around (Yes, I had the Cloudflare config from the latest version, because you have to remove the config on the website when reinstalling the Cloudflare add-on. Because of the reconfiguration of the same name).

A few links are stored in the Amazon Development Console:

https://MyHaDomain/auth/authorize
https://MyHaDomain/auth/token

I get the following messages when I enter them in the browser:

For auth/authorise: ‘Invalid redirect URI’
For auth/token: ‘405: Method Not Allowed’

No idea whether this is good or bad.


So I’ve done a few things and none of them have helped.
Does anyone have any idea what the problem might be, what else I should try? And no, I don’t want to switch to Nabu Cas now. It’s been working so far :wink:

I was able to solve it myself.

The solution: Delete all skills and functions and do it again!

No, I’m not joking, I spent 2 days trying to get it to work differently.

My way there was rocky and difficult, if you want to see my way to the solution, here is my German post about it.

The same thing happened to me, with a gradual failure over a period of weeks. I started to see occasional errors in the logs. Sometimes a device would fail and then work the next time. It finally got bad enough that I decided to disable and re-enable the Alexa skill although I never got a message about reactivating it. Unfortunately, I was not able to enable it after disabling it. I also tried lots of things and then found your post. I didn’t want to believe it at first, but nothing else worked, so I deleted my 80+ devices from Alexa, one at a time, then deleted my skill and function from Amazon servers. When I rebuilt it, the devices flowed back into Alexa, and everything works. Thank you for posting. It saved me some time and possibly some frustration although there was still quite a lot of that.

I’m having a similar issue but this is with a brand new implementation of the Alexa Skill. I have the Lambda function tested successfully but when enabling the skill in Alexa I get the “Unable to link the skill at this time”. It doesn’t even get around to calling the Lambda function.

Question for @tbclark3 and @LHBL2003, when you say you deleted all skills do you mean you went in to the Alexa app and unlinked all skills, or you deleted the skill from the Developer console and the AWS Lambda function? If it’s the latter, I’ll try starting again from scratch and see what happens.

FYI I did build the Google Assistant integration and it worked fine, no issues!

(update: I rebuilt the Alexa skill from scratch and still no joy, same issue)