Amazon Requires Senior Engineer Sign-Off After AI Coding Tools Linked to Major Outages

After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

Amazon's ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a "deep dive" into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a "trend of incidents" in recent months, characterized by a "high blast radius" and "Gen-AI assisted changes" among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under "contributing factors" the note included "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." "Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently," Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT. The note ahead of Tuesday's meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss. Amazon's website and shopping app went down for nearly six hours this month in an incident the company said involved an erroneous "software code deployment." The outage left customers unable to complete transactions or access functions such as checking account details and product prices. Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly "This Week in Stores Tech" (TWiST) meeting on a "deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives" the group hopes will limit future outages.

Amazon insists AI coding isn't source of outages

E-souk disputes report linking 'Gen-AI assisted changes' to recent high-impact incidents Amazon's weekly operations meeting today reportedly focused on recent service outages and on the role that code changes attributed to generative AI may have played. However, the company is downplaying the possibility of problems with AI. According to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the Financial Times, Amazon said that there had been a "trend of incidents" in recent months, characterized by a "high blast radius" and "Gen-AI assisted changes." The implication is that AI-assisted coding has made the company's infrastructure more fragile. And that's something Amazon disputes. Last Thursday, Amazon's website and ecommerce services were down for several hours for some users, an issue the company attributed to "a software code deployment." AWS was not involved, we're told. The Financial Times report follows coverage last month that AWS's Kiro AI tool made system changes that affected the availability of AWS Cost Explorer in the Mainland China partition. Amazon, at the time, said that its AI tool was not to blame: "This brief event was the result of user error - specifically misconfigured access controls - not AI." In the wake of that February incident, an Amazon spokesperson told The Register that "While security incidents involving misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool - AI-powered or not - we have not seen compelling evidence that incidents are more common with AI tools." The Register asked an Amazon spokesperson whether, in light of the Financial Times' current claims, the company maintains that there's no internal evidence "that incidents are more common with AI tools." We were reassured that the statement stands, though the company has provided no data that would allow an independent analysis of incident causes. An Amazon spokesperson said, "TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store. As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and app as we focus on continual improvement." Nonetheless, Amazon is extraordinarily attentive to this particular issue. Just five minutes elapsed between The Register's 0657 PT email inquiry and the 0702 PT call we received from a spokesperson during a dog walk. Even for Amazon - which in recent years has responded assertively and rapidly when presented with challenging claims, unlike competitors that may not even respond - that pace of corrective messaging is surprising. Writing for The Register last month, Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at Duckbill, expressed disbelief at the company's assertion that AI was not to blame in the February outage. "AWS would rather have the world believe their engineers are incompetent than admit their artificial intelligence made a mistake," he said. Other industry observers have raised similar concerns, arguing that headcount reductions compound the issues raised by AI. Following the major AWS outage last October, James Gosling, the lead designer of Java, who left his role as distinguished engineer at AWS in 2024, said in a LinkedIn post that the company's focus on revenue generation at the expense of everything else resulted in layoffs to teams that didn't directly generate revenue but were still important for infrastructure stability. "Back when the AI hype explosion happened and I was still at AWS I was astonished by how the structure of the business got torqued around, and how teams got demolished," Gosling wrote. "The ROI analysis was disastrously shortsighted. These systems are complex interconnected structures. Unless the whole ecosystem is comprehended in total, bad decisions are made." Following Gosling's departure, there were more layoffs, notably the 14,000 job cuts announced last October, justified by claims about the transformative nature of AI. ®

Amazon is making even senior engineers get code signed off following multiple recent outages

* Amazon and AWS have had a few high-profile incidents recently, caused by dodgy code * Mandatory meeting responded to "Gen-AI assisted changes" * Senior human oversight now required for code changes Amazon has reportedly called engineers into a mandatory 'deep dive' meeting to investigate recent outages and reliability issues, and it seems the fix is to humanize AI-generated content. For example, a six-hour outage on Amazon's main ecommerce site in March 2026 prevented users from being able to complete transactions, view account details and interact with certain product pages - and it was reportedly caused by an erroneous code deployment. The meeting stemmed from a "trend of incidents" with a "high blast radius," the Financial Times reports, suggesting "Gen-AI assisted changes" have been to blame for a number of recent incidents. Amazon seemingly worried about some AI code Amazon SVP Dave Treadwell acknowledged in an email seen by the FT that "the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently." In order to respond quickly to prevent future near-term incidents, Amazon is reportedly asking that AI-assisted code changes are now approved by senior engineers before they're deployed. So while Anthropic has launched Code Review for Claude Code to offer some speedy AI assistance to spot any bugs or vulnerabilities, Amazon is clearly emphasizing human expertise. Amazon's cloud arm, AWS, has also suffered two high-profile incidents in recent weeks, though the company asserts that one was an "extremely limited event" affecting certain mainland China services and the other did not impact "customer facing AWS service." The latest resolution, which involves senior human sign-off, came as part of Amazon's weekly 'This Week in Stores Tech' (TWiST) meeting, which Amazon says is a regular, optional get-together to "review operational performance across [its] store." This was was reportedly mandatory. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button! And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

Amazon is determined to use AI for everything - even when it slows down work

Corporate employees said Amazon's race to roll out AI is leading to surveillance, slop and 'more work for everyone'. When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. Now, it's mostly fixing what artificial intelligence breaks. The internal AI tool she's expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like "trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused". "I and many of my colleagues don't feel that it actually makes us that much faster," Dina said. "But from management, we are certainly getting messaging that we have to go faster, this will make us go faster, and that speed is the number one priority." Just days after speaking to the Guardian, Dina was laid off. Lisa, a supply chain engineer who has worked at Amazon for over a decade, says that AI tools at work have been helpful to her only in about one in every three attempts. And even then, she often finds issues and has to consult with colleagues to verify and correct their results, which takes up more time than if she's done the task without AI. She doesn't take issue with the AI tools themselves, but rather the company's logic in pushing all employees to use them daily. "You don't look at the problem and go, 'How do I use this hammer I have?' she said. "You look at it and go, 'Is this a problem for a hammer or something else?'" More than a half a dozen current and former Amazon corporate employees, in roles ranging from software engineer to user experience researcher to data analyst, told the Guardian that Amazon is pressing employees to integrate AI across all aspects of their work, even though these workers say this push is hurting productivity. They say Amazon is rolling out AI use in a haphazard way while also tracking their AI use, and they're worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements. All of this, they said, is demoralizing. The Guardian granted these workers anonymity because of their fear of professional repercussions. "We have hundreds of thousands of corporate employees in a wide range of roles across many different businesses, each of which is using AI in different ways to learn about what works best for their use cases," Montana MacLachlan, an Amazon spokesperson, said. "While different employees may have different experiences, what we hear from the vast majority of our teams is that they're getting a lot of value out of the AI tools that they use day-to-day." This pressure comes as Amazon has laid off 30,000 workers in the last four months - nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate workforce. Its cuts are part of a wave of recent AI-connected tech layoffs, including at Block, Pinterest and Autodesk. Exactly how much these companies will be able to rely on AI to replace headcount is unclear, and each company has given an array of sometimes contradictory reasons for reductions. Jack Dorsey, the Block CEO, said outright that AI was behind his 40% staffing cuts, while Pinterest and Autodesk said they were redirecting investments to AI. Amazon has waffled in explaining how AI factors into its layoff decisions, saying both that it would lead to reductions, but that recent cuts weren't AI-driven. The company said in February it would spend some $200bn this year on AI infrastructure and announced a $50bn investment in OpenAI. In a moment of rising anxiety about AI and work, the decisions Amazon makes around automation - and even how it talks about these shifts - will be consequential for not just its massive workforce, but for people in industries around the world. Amazon is the second-largest employer in the US and has long influenced workplace practices across both white collar and blue collar industries. "There's a lot of talk among corporate employees about how some of these practices - about performance, surveillance and monitoring - are somewhat imported from the warehouse and the drivers space, and that it is Amazon expanding this model of labor to white collar workers," Jack, a software engineer at Amazon for more than a decade, said. "It does feel like we're at the vanguard of a new stage in employer relations with the advent of AI." While Amazon has a reputation for being a tough place to work, the impact of its AI campaign has pressurized its workplace, workers said. "It's worse now," said Denny, a software engineer, who works in the retail space at the company. "If we don't pivot ... then we risk becoming obsolete and being let go in the next layoff." Whenever there's a task at hand, the biggest question managers ask is whether it can be done faster with AI tools, according to Denny. This is leading employees to use AI tools just for the sake of it. Recently, someone in Denny's team shared that an internal AI agent had saved him about a week of developer effort on a feature. But when Denny looked at the actual code review, he found dozens of comments from colleagues pointing out basic issues. The AI generated code was full of slop. "In the end, my guess is that the developer cycle is not going to change, and [could] even be potentially longer," said Denny. "This pressure to use [AI] has resulted in worse quality code, but also just more work for everyone." Denny was one of several workers who told the Guardian they're pressured to use an overwhelming array of AI tools, many of which were hastily developed in internal hackathons and then have to spend time answering surveys about their experience with the tools. "I would get shown these random tools by my manager who'd be like: 'Why don't you try using this thing?', and it was just the result of a hackathon," said Denny. He says the tools are "half-baked" and unhelpful, and in fact add to his workload because he has to vet them. Amazon typically organizes quarterly hackathons to encourage engineers to develop new projects. Sometime last year, Denny recalls, the company primarily switched to generative AI hackathons, during which the majority of projects ended up being developer productivity focused tools. "We don't mandate teams use AI tools," said Amazon's MacLachlan. "However, we believe these tools can help employees work more efficiently and automate time-consuming, undifferentiated tasks." There have also been public slip-ups that seem connected to Amazon's embrace of AI. According to a February FT report, Amazon recently experienced at least two outages because of issues with the company's internal AI tools, including a 13-hour interruption to a customer-facing system in December after some engineers allowed its AI tool "to make certain changes". Amazon, however, said that an employee, rather than AI, caused the service interruption. The FT reported on Tuesday that Amazon would convene engineers to explore "a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools". "I think if you continue to push people to use AI tools in every single aspect, you're going to get more errors like that," Sarah, an Amazon software engineer, said. Sarah said that AI can be useful, but its potential is best realized when engineers decide how to use it. But at Amazon, even when AI is not suited for a task, she's now expected to train it. "We have to write out detailed procedures so that the AI can understand it and give better output," said Sarah. "Part of my new job role, it feels like, is being asked to train the AI to essentially replace you." She's early in her career and worries that offloading her work to AI is stunting her learning curve. Forcing employees to adopt tools, according to Ifeoma Ajunwa, founding director of the AI and Future of Work Program at Emory University and the author of The Quantified Worker, usually backfires. "Generally, employees are in a better position [than management] to determine what tools can aid productivity," she said. Meanwhile, Amazon workers are often having to seek out training for AI best practices on their own. Will, a user experience researcher, said Amazon offers employees plenty of AI training videos on their learning portals, though most of them are optional. When he's attended training sessions, "the focus is always, 'here's how to build something as quickly as possible'". He said trainers - who are typically peer employees who are also AI power users - advise to carefully review each step before letting AI start building. At the same time, Will said: "I have been in several trainings where the instructor says you can just ask the AI to check its own work." However, you can't fully rely on AI to detect its own mistakes; that's something human judgment is better suited for. "One of the biggest predictors of AI adoption and whether employees feel that AI increases their productivity is whether management encourages it and provides training," Alex Imas, professor of behavioural science and economics at Chicago Booth, said. MacLachlan said Amazon provides different training and resources for people across the company, including structured options. "Employees are encouraged to use the tools themselves as a learning mechanism, adopting a learn-as-you-work approach that is proving to be one of the most practical and effective methods of AI adoption across the company," she said. Along with the productivity challenges that have come with Amazon's AI push, workers said it's also making them feel surveilled. For years, each morning when Amazon employees logged in to work, an internal system called Amazon Connections would greet them with a message and ask for feedback on topics like how their teams were functioning, or how satisfied they felt with their work. Over the last year, these questions have increasingly centered less on human factors and more on AI. Maria, a former product manager who was laid off from Amazon in January, said questions asking her about her career or team shifted to ones such as: "'Are you using AI in your daily work?,' 'How often are you using it?,' 'Do you think that you're a power user?,' or 'Is AI a priority in your organization?'". Then there are more obvious indicators of surveillance. Workers said managers at Amazon have a dashboard where they track their team members' AI use, including if they're using certain tools and how often they do so. (The Information first reported this in February.) Jack, the software developer who's worked at Amazon for more than a decade, said the company also launched a different dashboard, which the Guardian has viewed, so teams could see their generative AI adoption, engagement and depth of usage. "Every team treats it differently," he said, with some managers using it with a goal of getting at least 80% of their team using AI tools weekly. Sarah said her team's principal engineer told her and his other reports he checks this dashboard daily. "He's really been pushing our AI usage," she said. "Of course we want to understand what tools our teams are using and whether those tools are working well for them or could be improved," said MacLachlan. The inevitable result of AI tools getting deployed at scale is surveillance, according to Nick Srnicek, author of Platform Capitalism and a senior lecturer in digital economy at King's College London. "The rushed deployment of AI means an uncritical expansion of surveillance since these tools increasingly require detailed knowledge of personal workflows and data," he said. "To make them more capable means giving management greater insight and control over workers' everyday activities." Workers also said they suspect their career advancement is increasingly dependent on their enthusiastic embrace of AI. "We have promotion documents which have a template with questions like, 'What has this person done?', 'What impact did it have?' - and now it also has a question asking, 'How [did] they leverage AI?'," said Lisa. "I think they want to only keep the people who support this investment [in AI] and are going to try and filter out people who do not support it or have concerns about it." The Wall Street Journal reported in late February that at Amazon, "managers do consider who is all-in on AI when it comes to promotions". "While we expect employees to use resources - including AI - to make work more engaging and improve customers' lives, we don't instruct managers to consider AI utilization as part of our evaluation process," said MacLachlan. "Instead, we focus on AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company." At the same time, Andy Jassy, Amazon CEO, hasn't been shy about his AI expectations for his employees. In a company-wide email last June, he predicted that AI-driven productivity gains would reduce the company's corporate workforce, and urged workers to embrace AI. "Educate yourself, attend workshops and take trainings, use and experiment with AI whenever you can, participate in your team's brainstorms to figure out how to invent for our customers more quickly and expansively, and how to get more done with scrappier teams," he wrote. That same company-wide email prompted heavy internal pushback at Amazon last summer, with employees slamming Jassy's leadership and speaking of the demoralizing impact of the company's AI push, according to Business Insider. Months later, over 1,000 workers signed a petition that raised concerns about the company's "aggressive rollout" of AI tools. As Amazon has laid off thousands of workers, it's shared growing revenue numbers each quarter. Though Jassy has repeatedly said that these layoffs are neither "financially-driven" nor AI-driven, for Maria, all of this adds up. "If you say you automated away two hours of someone's job, you need to convert that into savings on that job title," she said, explaining the company's logic behind cutting jobs. "That's the unspoken math of what they're doing." Jack keeps thinking about comments Jassy made during a companywide all-hands meeting last spring. According to a Business Insider report about this meeting, Jassy responded to a question about running Amazon as "the world's largest startup", and said they want to be "scrappy" to "do a lot more things". He also warned that their competitors are the "most technically able, most hungry" companies, including startups "working seven days a week, 15 hours a day". "All of those things put together was an implicit threat that the people remaining at the company are expected to work longer and harder," said Jack. It "really struck home to me that if [Amazon] can't amass profits with endless growth, then it can get a little bit more by squeezing it out of the people working for it".

Amazon puts humans back in the loop as its retail website crashes from 'inaccurate advice' that an AI agent took from an old wiki | Fortune

Amazon repurposed its regular weekly retail technology meeting Tuesday to figure out why its retail website keeps breaking. The answer, buried in internal documents and then quickly deleted, according to the Financial Times: its own AI initiatives. Four high-severity incidents hit its retail website in a single week, including a six-hour meltdown last Thursday that locked shoppers out of checkout, account information and product pricing. The meeting, run by the senior vice president who oversees Amazon's ecommerce infrastructure, was framed as a "deep dive" into what went wrong. What went wrong, it turns out, involves the very AI tools Amazon has been pushing its own engineers to adopt, according to the FT. An internal document prepared for the meeting initially identified "GenAI-assisted changes" as a factor in a pattern of incidents stretching back to Q3. That reference was deleted before the meeting took place, according to the Financial Times, which viewed both versions of the document. Amazon has pushed back on the reporting. In a blog post, the company said only one incident involved AI tools, that "none of the incidents involved AI-written code," and that the cause was "an engineer following inaccurate advice that an agent inferred from an outdated internal wiki." Amazon also told Fortune the meeting was a routine weekly operations review, not an emergency gathering. The company also said it is not accurate that it introduced new approval requirements for engineers working with AI tools, and that AWS was not involved in any of the incidents. "As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and app as we focus on continual improvement," an Amazon spokesperson told Fortune. The internal documents, obtained and reported by CNBC, tell another story. Dave Treadwell, SVP of eCommerce Foundation, laid it out for staff:. Site availability had not been good recently, he wrote, and the string of Sev 1s -- the most severe classification for incidents that take down important systems -- demanded immediate attention. But the internal documents, as initially written, according to CNBC, tell a more complicated story. Treadwell acknowledged in his note that "best practices and safeguards" around generative AI usage haven't been fully established, and wrote that the company would introduce "controlled friction" into deployments involving the most critical parts of the retail experience, according to CNBC. Either way Amazon calls it, the message to engineers was that AI-assisted changes now get more scrutiny. The timing for that kind of admission is brutal for Amazon. The company, which just surpassed Walmart to top the Fortune 500, is spending more on AI infrastructure than any company on Earth -- $200 billion in projected capital expenditures this year. Amazon is also aggressively thinning out its workforce. The company laid off roughly 14,000 corporate workers in October -- mostly middle managers -- followed by another 16,000 in January. That's on top of more than 27,000 employees cut between 2022 and 2023. In June, Jassy wrote in an internal memo that Amazon would need fewer employees thanks to AI-driven "efficiency gains," repeating his drumbeat emphasizing the AI future of less workers needed at the giant retail platform. When the October cuts came, Jassy reframed the rationale on an earnings call to be about "culture," saying that the company had grown too fast during the pandemic, and Amazon needed to be "lean" and "move fast." But a separate Amazon memo announcing the same layoffs cited the need to adapt to "transformative technology," the kind of language that maps a lot more cleanly onto an AI-driven workforce reduction than a spring cleaning. But it seems that either way, Amazon has found itself in need of more humans in the process. It's an interesting narrative violation in a world of AI-related layoffs. Jack Dorsey's Block cut nearly half its workforce last month -- 4,000 employees -- and tied the decision explicitly to AI-driven productivity gains. Dorsey said most companies would reach the same conclusion within a year. Salesforce's Marc Benioff said he needed fewer heads after cutting 4,000 support roles. The C-suite consensus is that increasing AI investment will pay for itself with smaller workforces. But the promise that AI would lighten the load isn't playing out -- at least, not for the workers who remain, and not for the systems they manage. A new analysis reported by the Wall Street Journal of 164,000 workers by ActivTrak found that AI is increasing the speed, density, and complexity of work rather than reducing it. Time spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled after workers adopted AI tools. Time devoted to focused, uninterrupted work -- the kind required for solving complex problems -- fell 9%. Meanwhile, new research from Anthropic suggests the gap between what AI can theoretically automate and what it's actually automating is enormous. Even in software and math -- where 94% of tasks could theoretically be handled by AI, only about 33% are being automated today. Legal constraints and institutional troubles are all slowing deployment, Anthropic said. Amazon's outages could be a live demonstration of why.

AI code wreaked havoc with Amazon outage, and now the company is making tight rules

Turns out, giving an AI tool the keys to your infrastructure and walking away isn't a great idea. Amazon has been aggressively pushing its engineers to adopt AI tools. At least 80% of its developers are expected to use AI for coding tasks at least once a week. However, recent events suggest that this fast-tracked rollout may have come at a cost. As reported by the Financial Times, Amazon Web Services suffered a 13-hour outage in December after engineers let its Kiro AI coding tool update code without requiring any oversight. Kiro decided the best solution was to "delete and recreate the environment." That's one way to fix a problem, I suppose. That wasn't a one-off. A follow-up FT report revealed that Amazon's e-commerce business has been dealing with a "trend of incidents" since Q3 2025, prompting a company-wide deep dive meeting led by SVP Dave Treadwell. Recommended Videos Some employees were already skeptical about how useful these AI tools actually are for day-to-day work, and these incidents haven't exactly helped build confidence. Just how bad did it get? Business Insider obtained internal documents that paint a clearer picture of what actually happened. On March 2, 2026, Amazon's AI coding tools contributed to an incident that caused 120,000 lost orders and 1.6 million website errors. Three days later, on March 5, 2026, a separate outage caused a 99% drop in orders across North American marketplaces, resulting in 6.3 million lost orders. That's a number that will surely show on the bottom line of a financial sheet, even for a company as big as Amazon. What is Amazon doing to ensure it never happens again? Amazon is now rolling out a 90-day safety reset targeting around 335 critical systems. Engineers must get two people to review changes before deployment, use a formal documentation and approval process, and follow stricter automated checks. The company maintains that these were user errors, not AI errors, and that the same mistakes could happen with any developer tool. That's a fair point, but it doesn't change the outcome. When artificial intelligence tools are handed broad permissions without adequate oversight, things break, and the scale of AI-generated code only amplifies the damage.

Amazon owns up to needing more human oversight over AI code -- unfortunately, it wants to do that with fewer people

Turns out relying on AI-assisted vibe coding or similarly generative tools for major tech infrastructure has some drawbacks -- who could've foreseen this? Apparently, Amazon may have some regrets. Earlier this week, the e-commerce team at Amazon arranged a "deep dive" meeting with a number of engineers to investigate what led to a series of outages. A briefing note for the meeting on Tuesday was seen by The Financial Times, and it describes a "trend of incidents" with a "high blast radius." Some but not all of the discussed incidents were tied to the use of AI coding tools; "Novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established," was listed as one contributing factor. Though we don't know which incidents the group specifically discussed, internal communication suggests a broad scope. Dave Treadwell, the senior vice-president of Amazon's eCommerce Services team, is reported to have said to employees over email: "Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently." The meeting follows last week's six-hour Amazon outage that was due to "a software code deployment" (via CNBC). Relatedly, multiple reports have placed the blame for two Amazon Web Services outages last year at the feet of an AI coding tool allowed to 'delete and recreate the environment' from scratch. It's worth clarifying that AI coding tools aren't what caused the October 2025 outage that affected Fortnite, Roblox, Reddit, and many others -- that was a Domain Name System (DNS) error. Amazon claims the two December 2025 outages were "extremely limited," with one affecting just a single service in parts of mainland China, and the other apparently not affecting anything AWS customers would see. At any rate, Amazon isn't ditching AI coding tools; when these tools have been implicated in outages before, Amazon has been keen to frame it as an access issue rather than anything else. As such, the briefing note from this week's meeting reveals that junior and mid-level engineers at Amazon will now require a senior engineer to sign off on any AI-assisted changes. While guardrails and human oversight make sense for any AI use, in this instance, it arguably just adds to the workload of a greatly reduced team; according to The Financial Times, Amazon has laid off more than 30,000 employees since October 2025. One longstanding employee paints a particularly damning picture, saying, "Day to day it just feels untenable. Our workload is increasing and the number of [problems] to deal with is just piling up. Some managers know this is the case, but executives just keep pointing to some bigger AI picture."

'Proceed with caution': Elon Musk offers warning after Amazon reportedly held mandatory meeting to address 'high blast radius' AI-related incident | Fortune

Elon Musk has weighed in on reports Amazon is addressing recent outages, including one related to AI-assisted coding. The e-commerce giant held a mandatory meeting on Tuesday for a "deep dive" into multiple outages, including some as a result of the use of AI coding features, the Financial Times reported, citing internal briefs and emails. According to the outlet, Amazon said there was a "trend of incidents" in the past few months with a "high blast radius" and relating to "Gen-AI assisted changes," as well as other variables. Earlier this month, Amazon's website and shopping app were down for some users, with more than 22,000 users reporting an issue, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Customers were unable to check out, view prices for goods, or access their account information. At the time, Amazon said the outage was a result of "a software code deployment." The report of the meeting drew the attention of tech experts, including Musk, who made his comments public when he responded to a post from Lukasz Olejnik, a cybersecurity consultant and visiting senior research fellow at Department of War Studies, King's College London. "Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems," Olejnik wrote. "Proceed with caution," Musk replied. Dave Treadwell, Amazon's senior vice president of e-commerce services, reportedly wrote in an email that the team's weekly "This Week in Stores Tech" (TWiST) meeting would in part be used to implement additional guardrails on how AI is used by engineers, including requiring more senior engineers to sign off of AI-assisted changes made by junior and mid-level engineers. "Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently," Treadwell wrote in an internal email, the FT reported. An Amazon spokesperson told Fortune that the TWiST meeting is a regular weekly operations meeting with a group of retail technology teams and leaders to review operational performance. "As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and app as we focus on continual improvement," the spokesperson said in a statement. The company confirmed Amazon Web Services (AWS) was not involved in the incidents. Amazon said only one incident discussed was related to AI, but none involved AI-written code. Junior and mid-level engineers are also not required to have senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes, according to the company. The outages and subsequent meeting has raised concerns from cybersecurity experts about risks associated with the rapid rollout of AI tools. Features like Amazon's AI assistant Q can speed up the coding process, producing more code faster, but it may come at the risk of disrupting systems for how that code is written, checked, and deployed, making platforms more susceptible to outages, Olejnik told Fortune. "I'm not making an argument against deployment of AI," he said. "There isn't any. It can't be stopped. Everybody is going to deploy AI. It's an argument against speed for its own sake or using AI for the sake of using AI." Late last year, Amazon began the process of laying off thousands of workers, citing desires to become more efficient and align the company culturally. Those layoffs have continued into this year, with the company reducing staff by a further 16,000 in January. Meanwhile, Amazon has continued pouring money into AI, projecting $200 billion in capex in 2026, an increase from $131 billion in 2025. Musk, for his part, has previously said AI will bypass coding completely by the end of 2026. Olejnik warned the transition from human-centered coding to AI-run systems too quickly could result in missing safety checks resulting in prolonged downtime or data loss that could result in "blowing up" a business due to irresponsible AI deployment. When asked, he said he saw eye-to-eye with Musk regarding the level of attention AI deployment in tech should require. "I agree with him," Olejnik said. "AI brings a lot of opportunities, but there's a middle ground between going to obsolescence due to not using AI, and blowing up businesses due to ill-judged deployments."

Amazon to hold engineering meeting over recent outages. Is AI coding to blame?

This content has been selected, created and edited by the Finextra editorial team based upon its relevance and interest to our community. A briefing note seen by the FT mentioned a trend of incidents recently including "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established." The note did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss, the report said. A 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent, Kiro, autonomously choosing to "delete and then recreate" a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported. Another incident, in October, downed dozens of sites for hours and prompted discussion over the concentration of online services on infrastructure owned by a few massive companies. "Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently," Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email also seen by the FT. Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off on any AI-assisted changes, according to Treadwell. Amazon (AMZN) told the FT the review of website availability was "part of normal business" and it aims for continual improvement.

Vibe coding crashes Amazon

According to Financial Times, an urgent meeting has been held as Amazon, who made 30.000 people redundant last year, now face the consequences of using AI for complex coding. The newspaper was sent an internal note which reveals that all is not well as well as email material, with Dave Treadwell, senior VP being the author of either the note or one of the emails, and asking for senior engineers now have to overlook and approve any code changes that have been made using AI. Amazon had the meeting to look into why their systems has had crashes, or "outages" as its called, with senior engineers being called upon to find out why. Generative AI takes some of the blame, and a direct email to staff the company directly admits problems with "availability to the site and related infrastructure". This included 10.000+ customers being unable to checkout from the site, the app not working and outright crashing, and Amazon Web Services have, allegedly, tracked its own 13 hour crash to the use of AI coding, and it was not the only one. According to Financial times, this was in fact due to AI, namely Amazons own Kiro coding bot. Amazon did put out a statement that completely denied this, instead blaming it on simple human error. Industry analysts have pointed out that the problems arise as AI is no longer just a tool for assisting, but is actively making changes, costing companies like Amazon a lot of very real money, or using a lot of human work time, like the AI system Claude, which on multiple occasions, some of the very recently, have wiped out entire databases in a split second without considering the repercussions.

Amazon holds engineer meeting over AI-linked service disruptions- FT By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Amazon has called a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday to examine a series of outages linked to artificial intelligence, the Financial Times reported. The online retailer said there had been a "trend of incidents" in recent months, marked by a "high blast radius" and "Gen-AI assisted changes" among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. The note listed "novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established" as a contributing factor. Amazon's website and shopping app went down for nearly six hours this month in an incident the company attributed to incorrect "software code deployment". The outage prevented customers from completing transactions or accessing functions such as checking account details and product prices. Amazon Web Services has experienced at least two incidents connected to the use of AI coding assistants, which the company has been rolling out to its staff. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.