Is Alexa Overloaded

My family got Amazon Echos for Christmas. After setup the devices are very slow and glitchy, like taking minutes to switch songs and then consrantly having volume increade and decrease with no inputs? Is Amazon's service overloaded? Or some setup process running in the background making things bad at the start? Or they are always this way? Or bad hardware? (I could imagine the volume problem as a poor electrical connection of the speaker).