Welcome! I’m sure that’s very frustrating. 
For the past few days, “event processing” has been messed up for some people, causing events to be reported late or not at all. That could have caused the issue you’ve seen. It’s supposed to be fixing itself, but it’s been slow for some people. You can read more about that in the following thread.
You should report the issue to support, but if that’s it, there won’t be anything you as an individual customer can do until it’s fixed. 
That said, let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing.
I’m not aware of any official or unofficial feature called “Alexa Speaks.”
There was a very popular community-created smartapp called “Echo Speaks,” but it was discontinued last year and I don’t believe there’s any configuration where it currently works. There was a similar community created smartapp called EchoSistant, but I believe it was also discontinued.
There is a third party Alexa skill called “Voice Monkey” which some community members use.
There is an official Alexa Routines feature in Amazon’s Alexa app which normally works quite well. It relies on the official SmartThings Alexa Skill, though, which itself has had quite a few issues (and much forum discussion) since the second generation was introduced.
There may be other ways to have a SmartThings sensor trigger an Alexa
Announcement as well, I’m not up to date on everything.
Anyway, can you post a screenshot of the screen where the rule is defined? That would help us know if there might be anything else causing the issue.