AWS Outages Traced to Kiro AI Coding Tool as Amazon Blames User Error Over AI Autonomy

An AI coding bot took down Amazon Web Services

Amazon's cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools, leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant's push to roll out these coding assistants. Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter. The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to "delete and recreate the environment." Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the "outage" of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group's AI tools had been at the center of a service disruption. "We've already seen at least two production outages [in the past few months]," said one senior AWS employee. "The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable." AWS, which accounts for 60 percent of Amazon's operating profits, is seeking to build and deploy AI tools including "agents" capable of taking actions independently based on human instructions. Like many Big Tech companies, it is seeking to sell this technology to outside customers. The incidents highlight the risk that these nascent AI tools can misbehave and cause disruptions. Amazon said it was a "coincidence that AI tools were involved" and that "the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action." "In both instances, this was user error, not AI error," Amazon said, adding that it had not seen evidence that mistakes were more common with AI tools. The company said the incident in December was an "extremely limited event" affecting only a single service in parts of mainland China. Amazon added that the second incident did not have an impact on a "customer facing AWS service." Neither disruption was anywhere near as severe as a 15-hour AWS outage in October 2025 that forced multiple customers' apps and websites offline -- including OpenAI's ChatGPT. Employees said the group's AI tools were treated as an extension of an operator and given the same permissions. In these two cases, the engineers involved did not require a second person's approval before making changes, as would normally be the case. Amazon said that by default its Kiro tool "requests authorisation before taking any action" but said the engineer involved in the December incident had "broader permissions than expected -- a user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue." AWS launched Kiro in July. It said the coding assistant would advance beyond "vibe coding" -- which allows users to quickly build applications -- to instead write code based on a set of specifications. The group had earlier relied on its Amazon Q Developer product, an AI-enabled chatbot, to help engineers write code. This was involved in the earlier outage, three of the employees said. Some Amazon employees said they were still skeptical of AI tools' utility for the bulk of their work given the risk of error. They added that the company had set a target for 80 percent of developers to use AI for coding tasks at least once a week and was closely tracking adoption. Amazon said it was experiencing strong customer growth for Kiro and that it wanted customers and employees to benefit from efficiency gains. "Following the December incident, AWS implemented numerous safeguards," including mandatory peer review and staff training, Amazon added.

Multiple AWS outages caused by AI coding bot blunder, report claims -- Amazon says both incidents were 'user error'

You really shouldn't give AI free rein to do anything it wants on your system. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has reportedly suffered from a couple of outages due to misbehaving AI agents. According to the Financial Times, the most recent interruption happened in December last year, when its Koiro AI coding tool decided to erase the environment it was working on, resulting in a 13-hour disruption. "We've already seen at least two production outages," one senior AWS employee told the publication. "The engineers let the AI resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable." On the other hand, the company reported that the incidents were relatively minor, with the December disruption only affecting a single service in parts of mainland China, and the other one having no effect on customer-facing services. Amazon said to the Financial Times that the involvement of AI tools in these incidents was just a coincidence, and that the same issue would have occurred even with other developer tools or through manual action. "In both instances, this was user error, not AI error," the company said. AWS employees report that the company's AI tools are treated as part and parcel of the person using them; therefore, they receive the same permissions. But because the engineers involved in the two incidents did not require secondary approval, their AI agents just went ahead with their changes that broke the systems. It's because of this that the company treated the errors as a user access control issue and does not consider it a problem with its AI tool. Nevertheless, the company assured that it has taken steps to avoid this issue in the future and mitigate the risks of an AI agent going rogue and taking down systems with its actions. Amazon isn't the only big tech company deploying AI tools in its workflows. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that nearly 30% of its code is written by artificial intelligence, while over 30,000 Nvidia engineers use a specialized version of Cursor AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang himself allegedly asked managers not using AI "Are you insane?" All this use of AI tools meant that new entry-level coding jobs are drying up, with studies revealing a 13% drop in openings over the past three years. This has raised fears that artificial intelligence will decimate white-collar jobs, with industry leaders, CEOs, and educational institutions warning of the impending catastrophe if society does not prepare for it. Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Who's to Blame? Amazon Links 2 AWS Outages to Autonomous AI Coding Agent

AI coding agents might be all the rage, but they should come with a serious warning label: Use (or let loose) at your own risk. Agents perform tasks on your computer autonomously with little human direction. However, Amazon reportedly traced two recent AWS outages to engineers using its Kiro AI coding assistant, which launched in July 2025 with a mission to "tame the complexity" of vibe coding. Amazon provided an internal post-mortem on one of the outages, which happened in December and lasted approximately 13 hours. But employees told the FT that it was the second time in as many months that Amazon's AI tools were involved in a service disruption. (Both were unrelated to the massive October AWS incident that seemed to take down half the internet.) The Kiro tool reportedly took it upon itself to "delete and recreate the environment," the FT says. However, Amazon disputes the characterization, saying it was "user error, not AI error" since the agents were given "broader permissions than expected." Kiro will ask engineers before taking any major actions, but apparently, the person involved in the December incident had permission to deploy changes to production without a second approval, suggesting it could be a management problem. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But it told TechRadar Pro that the December outage was an "extremely limited event" affecting AWS Cost Explorer in one of two regions in Mainland China. In any case, it's safe to say AI coding agents are creating a major wrinkle in how tech companies diagnose and prevent issues. Rogue agents are not uncommon; one deleted a startup's entire database without asking for permission, then apologized to the user. "Oh, so when it works, it's 'agentic,' but when it fails, it's actually 'user error,'" says one Redditor in response to the incident. "The part that gets me is that this wasn't some startup moving fast and breaking things," adds another. "If [Amazon] can't get the guardrails right, the rest of us should probably pump the brakes on giving these tools write access to anything that matters." Amazon may have been quick to dismiss the AI's involvement, since products like Kiro are en vogue and competing with the likes of Claude Code. AI agents are capturing particular interest this year, most recently with the viral OpenClaw coding tool, whose creator was recruited to OpenAI last week to accelerate its agentic products, despite OpenClaw's security issues. At the same time, it could be beneficial for Amazon to maintain accountability for its engineers when using AI tools. It can be easy to simply approve AI-generated code without taking the time to make sure it works. While many programmers are hooked on AI-powered coding, enjoying how it can take menial tasks off their plate, others are concerned about hidden security issues, bugs, and tech debt created by agents that have yet to be discovered.

AWS would rather blame engineers than AI

opinion I've been watching AWS explain away outages for the better part of a decade. And this is hard! The most common thing computers do is break, and being forthcoming and transparent about that reality while not making your platform sound like an incoherent pile of bricks teetering on a cliff above a playground is a delicate balancing act. AWS's reliability is the stuff of legend, and on the rare occasion that it fails, they walk the messaging tightrope very well. So I was surprised to learn all you have to do to sweep away twenty years of excellence and make them sound like frothing insecure zealots is sprinkle a bit of "perhaps AWS is bad at AI" narrative on it. Then, they lose their minds. The first sign that AWS has once again blown a gasket is when they post a defensive blog post strongly insinuating that a journalist at a major publication is an idiot. (I hope to one day receive one myself; perhaps I need to get louder?) Sure enough, a post titled Correcting the Financial Times report about AWS, Kiro, and AI, which does NOT show up on their list of blog posts, strikes that blended Amazon tone of "salty, defensive, and more than a little insulting." Let me set the scene: Kiro launched in July 2025 as Amazon's answer to the agentic AI coding tools flooding the market. And to its credit, for a month or two it was great! It had a "spec" approach that was less "ready, fire, aim" than most other tooling at that point, and due to its surprise popularity, it was very hard to get access to it. As an aside, it hasn't changed much since then, and has been lapped by a number of competitors. Gathering Reddit posts, comments on the incident, and AWS's weirdly defensive blog post, it seems that what happened is that someone was using the tool; it fired off a CloudFormation teardown-and-replace (which is what CloudFormation often does, because ... CloudFormation) while the user was mistakenly in a production environment. Whoops. This took down Cost Explorer in the Mainland China partition. AWS goes to great pains to highlight that it was "only one of their 39 geographic regions" without mentioning that Cost Explorer is only deployed in one of those regions per partition (in this case, the partition was "Mainland China"). We have all been there. Let the engineer who has never experienced the "wait, am I in production?" sinking sense of dread cast the first stone. But Amazon's official response reads like a hostage note written by someone protecting their captor. The incident was a "coincidence that AI tools were involved." The same issue could occur with "any developer tool." The engineer involved had "broader permissions than expected." Yes! This is what the messy business of building things looks like, and it's pretty clear that some controls were skipped in this case. Claude Code periodically likes to do that in my test environment as well, and is only hampered by the grim reality that even after being trained on the sum total of human knowledge, it still can't figure out how the hell the AWS CLI parameters and arguments work together. Neither can I. This is probably fine. But think about this "fists of ham" communications strategy for a second! Their AI is implicated in deleting production infrastructure, and their crisis communications team's first instinct was to find a human and hurl them under the closest bus. The tweet practically writes itself: "AI deletes the database. AWS spokesperson arrives at press conference: It was me! I did it! Don't blame the AI, I'm just incompetent!" This isn't a coverup; it's a massive insecurity that's extremely cringey to witness. AWS would rather have the world believe their engineers are incompetent than admit their artificial intelligence made a mistake. That's not just a messaging choice. That's a company so desperate not to look behind in the AI race that they'd torch their own employees' reputations to protect their robot's feelings. What does it say about AWS's strategic position that defending the AI's reputation takes priority over protecting their humans? When did "don't hurt the algorithm's feelings" become corporate policy? I challenge anyone to cite the Amazonian "Strive to be the Earth's Best Employer" leadership principle without sounding sarcastic. You can't; it's impossible. The post-incident fix their blog post alludes to? Mandatory peer reviews for AI-generated changes. Let me translate: the solution to "AI made unsupervised changes that broke everything" is "add a human to supervise." The same humans they're laying off by the thousands. The same humans they'll throw under the bus when the next AI incident happens. Things break. Code has bugs. AI will make mistakes. This is the natural order of building complex systems, and anyone who's been in this business longer than a funding cycle understands that. The problem isn't that Kiro decided production was due for a surprise deletion. The problem is that when faced with their first major AI failure, AWS's instinct wasn't transparency or accountability. It was to protect the AI's reputation at all costs. If your cloud provider would rather look incompetent than admit its AI is fallible, sit with that for a second. Not because this particular outage was the end of the world. It wasn't. It's Cost Explorer, for God's sake; I spend meaningful chunks of my life with that service, and it being down for a few hours just means I'll do something else for a bit. But we are at the exact moment where every cloud vendor is asking you to hand agentic AI the keys to your production environment. When the first real test case showed up, AWS's communications instinct was to protect the robot and throw the human under the bus. AWS will figure out AI eventually. They always do, even if "eventually" means half a decade of the community screaming into the void first. But they won't get there by pretending their tools can't make mistakes, and they definitely won't get there by publicly kneecapping their own engineers every time one does. The company that built its empire on "everything fails all the time" has apparently found the one thing it refuses to let fail: the narrative that it's good at AI. ®

13-hour AWS outage reportedly caused by Amazon's own AI tools

A recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that lasted 13 hours was reportedly caused by one of its own AI tools, . This happened in December after engineers deployed the Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, say four people familiar with the matter. Kiro is an agentic tool, meaning it can take autonomous actions on behalf of users. In this case, the bot reportedly determined that it needed to "delete and recreate the environment." This is what allegedly led to the lengthy outage that primarily impacted China. Amazon says it was merely a "coincidence that AI tools were involved" and that "the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action." The company blamed the outage on "user error, not AI error." It said that by default the Kiro tool "requests authorization before taking any action" but that the staffer involved in the December incident had "broader permissions than expected -- a user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue." Multiple Amazon employees spoke to Financial Times and noted that this was "at least" the second occasion in recent months in which the company's AI tools were at the center of a service disruption. "The outages were small but entirely foreseeable," said one senior AWS employee. The company and has since . Leadership set an 80 percent weekly use goal and has been closely tracking adoption rates. Amazon also sells access to the agentic tool for a monthly subscription fee.

Amazon's vibe-coding tool Kiro reportedly vibed too hard

Bezos-corp blames user error for outage, 'specifically misconfigured access controls' In a cautionary tale of agentic AI, AWS reportedly suffered service outages caused by its own AI coding tools in December - though the company insists the downtime was ultimately due to human error. Amazon's cloud platform suffered a 13-hour disruption affecting one service after resident engineers allowed Kiro to make changes, according to four sources who spoke to the Financial Times. Kiro, unveiled last year, is described by AWS as an agentic coding service than can turn prompts into detailed specs and then into working code, with the aim of making it easier to bring vibe-coded apps into a production environment. The service was designed to avoid the pitfalls that have already plagued other AI-enhanced development tools, such as wiping an entire hard drive partition or deleting a database. However, Kiro reportedly opted to "delete and recreate the environment" that led to the outage in late 2025. This was not the first time the firm's AI tools had been involved in a service interruption after being allowed to resolve issues without human intervention, per the FT report. However, Amazon's version of events differs, according to a spokesperson. In a statement sent to The Register, the company said: "This brief event was the result of user (AWS employee) error - specifically misconfigured access controls - not AI. The service interruption was an extremely limited event last year when a single service (AWS Cost Explorer - which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our two Regions in Mainland China was affected. "This event didn't impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. Following these events, we implemented numerous additional safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access." AWS said users need to configure which actions Kiro can take, and by default, Kiro requests authorization before taking any action, but in this case an engineer was using a role with broader permissions than expected. While Amazon denies Kiro was to blame, it still serves as a warning for anyone thinking of allowing AI agents to take actions without human oversight. There is a growing body of stories, including one where an agent got stuck in a loop repeatedly calling a database API. Kiro has had some other issues since its launch. AWS had to introduce daily usage limits and a user waitlist for the tool last year, citing unexpectedly high demand, and a "pricing bug" that led some users to describe it as "a wallet-wrecking tragedy." ®

Amazon pushes back on Financial Times report blaming AI coding tools for AWS outages

Seven hours at the top of Techmeme was apparently too much for Amazon to take. The tech giant's cloud division, Amazon Web Services, issued an unusually pointed public rebuttal Friday afternoon to a widely cited Financial Times report asserting that Amazon's own AI coding tools have caused at least two AWS outages in recent months. The story was picked up by numerous media outlets, and the widely followed tech news aggregator, as an example of the risks of deploying agentic AI tools, and the underlying question of who -- or what -- is responsible when something goes wrong. In a blog post titled "Correcting the Financial Times report about AWS, Kiro, and AI," Amazon acknowledged a limited disruption to a single service in one region last December but attributed it to a user error in configuring access controls, not a flaw in the AI tool itself. "The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role -- the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action," Amazon said, noting that it received no customer inquiries about the disruption. In addition, the company wrote, "The Financial Times' claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false." This is where it gets into semantics, the key phrase being "impacted AWS." In fact, the FT reported that Amazon itself acknowledged a second incident but said it did not affect a "customer-facing AWS service." In other words, if an incident doesn't impact a service used by customers, does it count as an outage? The FT called it one. Amazon clearly thinks not. And this is ultimately the crux of the dispute. As for the undisputed outage impacting AWS, the FT's report cited four people familiar with the matter in describing a 13-hour interruption to an AWS system in mid-December. The sources said engineers had allowed Amazon's Kiro AI coding tool -- an agentic assistant capable of taking autonomous actions -- to make changes, and that the tool determined the best course of action was to "delete and recreate the environment." Multiple Amazon employees told the publication that it was the second time in recent months that AI tools had been involved in a service disruption. According to the FT report, a senior AWS employee said the outages were "small but entirely foreseeable," adding that engineers had let the AI agent resolve issues without human intervention. AWS is Amazon's most profitable division. It generated $35.6 billion in revenue last quarter, up 24%, and $12.5 billion in operating income. The cloud unit is a significant focus of the company's planned $200-billion capital spending spree this year, much of it directed toward AI infrastructure. In addition to using agentic tools in its own operations, Amazon is selling them to AWS customers, making any narrative about AI-caused outages particularly unwelcome. Amazon's core defense -- that the December incident was "user error, not AI error" -- was already included in the FT's original story. The blog post largely restates that position in a more prominent and pointed way. "We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption," Amazon wrote in its response. "We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again -- not because the event had a big impact (it didn't), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience." Amazon said the disruption was limited to AWS Cost Explorer, a tool that lets customers track their cloud spending, in one of its 39 geographic regions. Reuters and The Verge reported that the affected region was in mainland China, citing an Amazon spokesperson. It did not affect core services such as compute, storage, or databases, the company said. The company added that it has since implemented new safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access. Posting on X, New York Times reporter Mike Isaac called the Amazon response "the most prickly" he'd seen from Amazon in years, comparing it to the past era when former White House press secretary Jay Carney, who led public policy for the company, spoke out strongly in its defense.

Amazon Reportedly Pins the Blame for AI-Caused Outage on Humans

When Amazon Web Services got hit by a 13-hour outage in December, it wasn't because a person tripped over a cord. According to a report from the Financial Times, several anonymous Amazon employees said that the outage was the fault of Kiro, Amazon's AI coding assistantâ€"though Amazon reportedly blamed human error for the situation. According to the accounts given to the Financial Times, Kiro was working autonomously when it came across an issue. It decided that its best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment†that was causing problems. That, according to the accounts, led to the outage that Amazon described as an “extremely limited event,†ultimately knocking out service in one part of mainland China. Under typical circumstances, Kiro requires two people to approve of its proposed changes before moving forward. But in this case, the AI agent was reportedly working with an engineer who had broader permissions than lower-ranking employees, and Kiro was being treated as an extension of an operator. As a result, it was given the same permissions as a person and was allowed to push the change without approval, which led to the outage. It also apparently wasn't the first time that this has happened. Per FT, it is at least the second incident in which Kiro was given additional free rein and ultimately buffed it. The prior situation didn't affect any “customer-facing AWS service,†so it went unnoticed to the world outside of AWS. But employees seem to be taking notice. Amazon has pushed Kiro hard since it introduced the coding assistant back in July, reportedly offering guidance to employees that they use the internal tool over outside options like OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude Code, or Cursorâ€"apparently to the chagrin of engineers, who would prefer to use tools like Claude. Perhaps then it's not surprising that Amazon is particularly defensive of its precious baby Kiro. According to the Financial Times, the company described the outage incident as "a user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue," and said that it was just a “coincidence that AI tools were involved†because “the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action." The latter part is true; a person could have made the same error. The thing is, though, that they didn't. It was an AI agent that allegedly had an unexpected level of access to the company's code base and made a boo-boo. Amazon has reportedly told employees that it wants to get 80% of its developers using AI for coding tasks at least once a week. If you find yourself unable to log in to Spotify or Discord, just know that Amazon hit its goal.

An Amazon service disruption in December was triggered by AI tools, report claims

As major companies around the world start incorporating AI into virtually all aspects of their operation, things are bound to get a little wonky from time to time. That's reportedly what happened to Amazon this past December, per the Financial Times. The company's Amazon Web Services, which makes up the backbone of a large part of the internet as we know it, experienced a 13-hour disruption, which the Financial Times describes as an outage. In a statement provided to Mashable, an Amazon spokesperson characterized the event as a limited interruption affecting "one of our two Regions in Mainland China." However, the Financial Times spoke to multiple sources who said the problem was caused by engineers allowing the agentic Kiro AI system to perform some tasks, which led the AI to "delete and recreate the environment." Mind you, this event wasn't anywhere near the same scale as the big Amazon Web Services outage last October. In addition, AWS published a blog post "to address the inaccuracies in the Financial Times' reporting." An AWS spokesperson also told Reuters that it was a "brief event" caused by "user error," not AI. In other words, if the Financial Times report is true, then the company is placing blame on the engineers who let the AI perform tasks rather than the AI itself. The spokesperson also said the December issues did not impact major infrastructural services as the October AWS outage did, and that the company is not aware of any customer complaints related to the event. An Amazon spokesperson provided the following statement to Mashable by email: "This was an extremely limited event last year when a single service (AWS Cost Explorer -- which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our two Regions in Mainland China was affected for 13 hours. This event did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. We are also not aware of any related customer inquiries resulting from this isolated interruption. In both instances referenced, the root cause was user error -- specifically misconfigured access controls -- not AI error. Kiro puts developers in control -- users need to configure which actions Kiro can take, and by default, Kiro requests authorization before taking any action. Following the December incident, AWS implemented numerous safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access, enhanced training on AI-assisted troubleshooting, and resource protection measures." Big, high-profile outages have been a recurring event on the internet lately. Most recently, we saw YouTube suffer a brief global outage. See also: Verizon, Cloudflare, Microsoft 365, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and TikTok. Experts disagree as to whether internet outages are becoming more common. However, one fact is clear: As websites and apps increasingly rely on a small number of cloud providers -- including Amazon Web Services -- a single outage can have widespread, cascading effects across the internet. UPDATE: Feb. 20, 2026, 8:24 p.m. EST We have updated this story with an additional statement and denial from Amazon Web Services. Based on the statement from AWS, we have added additional information on which region the disruption affected. We have also removed a sentence from our story: "While the notion that Amazon's internal AI can facilitate infrastructure outages is not exactly encouraging, at least it didn't result in anything catastrophic."

Amazon's cloud 'hit by two outages caused by AI tools last year'

Reported issues at Amazon Web Services raise questions about firm's use of artificial intelligence as it cuts staff Amazon's huge cloud computing arm reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools, raising questions about the company's embrace of AI as it lays off human employees. A 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services' (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent autonomously choosing to "delete and then recreate" a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported. AWS, which provides vital infrastructure for much of the internet, suffered several outages last year. One 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. AWS has won 189 UK government contracts worth £1.7bn since 2016, the Guardian reported in October. The AI-caused outages were smaller events, said the company, and only one affected customer-facing services. Amazon confirmed plans to cut 16,000 jobs in January, after it laid off 14,000 staff last October. In January, its chief executive, Andy Jassy, reportedly said these cuts were about company culture, and not about replacing workers with AI. However, Jassy has previously said that efficiency gains from AI will "reduce" Amazon's workforce in the coming years, and AI agents will allow it to "focus less on rote work and more on thinking strategically about how to improve customer experiences." In a statement to the FT, Amazon said it was a "coincidence" that AI tools were involved in the outages, and that there was no evidence that such technology led to more errors than human engineers. "In both instances, this was user error, not AI error," it said. Several experts were sceptical of this assessment. A security researcher, Jamieson O'Reilly, said: "While engineering errors caused by traditional tools and humans are not a rare occurrence, the difference between these and mishaps where AI is involved is that 'without' AI, a human typically needs to manually type out a set of instructions, and while doing so they have much more time to realise their own error." AI agents are often deployed in constrained environments and for specific tasks, O'Reilly said, and cannot understand the broader ramifications of, for example, restarting a system or deleting a database - which may have led to the error at Amazon. "They don't have full visibility into the context in which they're running, how your customers might be affected or what the cost of downtime might be at 2am on a Tuesday," he said. "You've got to continually remind these tools of the context - 'hey, this is serious, don't stuff this up'. And if you don't do this, it starts to forget about all the other consequences." Last year, an AI agent designed by the tech company Replit to build an app deleted an entire company database, fabricating reports, and then lying about its actions. Michał Woźniak, a cybersecurity expert, said it would be nearly impossible for Amazon to completely prevent internal AI agents from making errors in future, because AI systemsmake unexpected choices and are extremely complex. "Amazon never misses a chance to point to "AI" when it is useful to them - like in the case of mass layoffs that are being framed as replacing engineers with AI. But when a slop generator is involved in an outage, suddenly that's just 'coincidence'," he added.

Recent AWS outages blamed on AI tools - at least two incidents took down Amazon services

* At least two recent Amazon outages were caused by misconfigured AI tools * Amazon asserts incidents were "user error, not AI error" * The company has implemented "numerous safeguards" At least two recent AWS outages were caused by incidents involving Amazon's own AI coding tools, the company has said. A report by the Financial Times (FT) notes a 13-hour interruption in mid-December 2025 was the result of Amazon's Kiro AI coding agent, which had reportedly decided to delete and recreate the environment. Although AWS had published an internal report on the cause of the issue, this was never shared publicly, but the FT has obtained the information from four unnamed people familiar with the matter. Amazon outages caused by internal AI tools Though Amazon's own AI tools were partly responsible for the outage, the company did stress that "user error, not AI error" was the ultimate cause, attributing the outage to misconfigured access controls. "The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention," one of the FT's sources wrote. "The outages were small but entirely foreseeable." Amazon described this particular incident as an "extremely limited event," but another 15-hour outage in October 2025 had broader implications affecting public apps and websites. Again, the FT's sources suggest incorrect permissions were to blame, with the AI tools given the same permissions as human workers and its output not given the same approval as would usually be the case with human workers. Despite very clear dangers, the unnamed sources shared that Amazon is targeting an 80% AI adoption rate among its developers, based on once-per-week usage. A target that could increase as adoption rises. Speaking about the AI-induced incidents, Amazon wrote: "Following the December incident, AWS implemented numerous safeguards." 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's Blundering AI Caused Multiple AWS Outages

Is this a forecast of how hopelessly AI-dependent our tech overlords will be going forward? Are AI tools reliable enough to be used at in commercial settings? If so, should they be given "autonomy" to make decisions? These are the questions being raised after at least two internet outages at Amazon's cloud division were allegedly caused by blundering AI agents, according to new reporting from the Financial Times. In one incident in December, engineers at Amazon Web Services allowed its in-house Kiro "agentic" coding tool to make changes that sparked a 13-hour disruption, according to four sources familiar with the matter. The AI, ill-fatedly, had decided to "delete and recreate the environment," the sources said. Amazon employees claimed that this was not the first service disruption involving an AI tool. "We've already seen at least two production outages [in the past few months]," one senior AWS employee told the FT. "The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable." AWS launched its in-house coding assistant, Kiro, in July. The company describes the tool as an "autonomous" agent that can help deliver projects "from concept to production." Another AI coding assistant developed by Amazon, described as an AI assistant, was involved in the earlier outage. The employees said the AI tools were treated as an extension of an operator and given operator-level permissions. In both of the outages, the engineers didn't require a second person's approval before finalizing the changes, going against typical protocol. In a statement to the FT, Amazon claimed the outage was an "extremely limited event" that affected only one service in parts of China. Moreover, it was a "coincidence that AI tools were involved" and that "the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action," it said. It also claimed that its Kiro AI "requests authorisation before taking any action," but that the engineer involved in the December outage had more permissions than usual, calling this a "user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue." "In both instances, this was user error, not AI error," Amazon insisted. The company also claimed that it had not seen evidence that mistakes were more common with AI tools. To which we retort: is Amazon living under a rock? While AI and its foray into commercial applications remain nascent, there's no shortage of evidence showing that the tools are prone to malfunctioning. Their proclivity for producing hallucinations, or instances in which they fabricate facts, is well documented. So are their weak guardrails. Even some of Amazon's own employees are reluctant to use AI tools because of the risk of error, they told the FT. Veteran programmers are finding that AI coding assistants consistently spit out botched code, with several studies showing that the frequent double and triple-checking the questionable outputs require in reality slow down software engineers, even though the AI, on a surface level, may be producing the code faster. The rise of "vibe coding" with AI has resulted in numerous blunders in which an agentic AI makes decisions that its owners didn't intend. Of course, it would not be much of a ringing endorsement if tech companies weren't using the AI tools they claim will supercharge productivity in their own operations, and they've been more than willing to get high on their own supplies. Both Microsoft and Google boast that over a quarter of their code is now written with AI. Engineers at Anthropic and OpenAI have suggested that nearly 100 percent of their code is AI written. It's also ludicrous for Amazon to handwave aside the outages as simple user error rather than AI. AI was used to produce the code. And Amazon, as well as its competitors, is consistently telling its employees and customers that they should depend on the tools more. Employees told the FT that the company had set a target for 80 percent of developers to use AI for coding tasks at least once a week. This is nothing short of a mandate to use AI. But if the AI goes awry, it will be the employee's fault, never the AI's -- or, for that matter, the bosses pushing it. The newly revealed AI blunders are, as far as we know, unrelated to the massive AWS outage that took out what felt like half the internet last October. But in light of these revelations, plus the company's increasingly heavy dependence on AI tools, you have to wonder if the tech figured into that disaster, somehow.

Two Amazon cloud outages in December triggered by AI tools

As major companies around the world start incorporating AI into virtually all aspects of their operation, things are bound to get a little wonky from time to time. That's reportedly what happened to Amazon this past December, per the Financial Times. The company's cloud infrastructure, which makes up the backbone of a large part of the internet as we know it, experienced two minor outages that month, including a 13-hour outage in the middle of the month. It was apparently caused by engineers allowing the agentic Kiro AI system to perform some tasks, which led the AI to "delete and recreate the environment." Mind you, this event wasn't anywhere near the same scale as the big Amazon Web Services outage last October. An AWS spokesperson told Reuters that it was a "brief event" caused by "user error," not AI by itself. In other words, if the latest report is true, then the company is placing blame on the engineers who let the AI perform tasks rather than the AI itself. At any rate, the spokesperson also said the December outages did not impact major infrastructural services as the big October one did. While the notion that Amazon's internal AI can facilitate infrastructure outages is not exactly encouraging, at least it didn't result in anything catastrophic. Big, high-profile outages have been a recurring event on the internet lately. Most recently, we saw YouTube suffer a brief global outage. See also: Verizon, Cloudflare, Microsoft 365, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and TikTok. Experts disagree as to whether internet outages are becoming more common. However, one fact is clear: As websites and apps increasingly rely on a small number of cloud providers -- including Amazon Web Services -- a single outage can have widespread, cascading effects across the internet.

Amazon's cloud unit hit by outage involving AI tools in December

The Financial Times reported earlier that ⁠the ⁠service suffered two outages in December stemming from errors involving its own AI tools, citing people familiar with the matter. Amazon's cloud unit AWS had suffered an outage impacting a cost-management feature in December, a spokesperson told Reuters on Friday. The Financial Times reported earlier that ⁠the ⁠service suffered two outages in December stemming from errors involving its own AI tools, citing people familiar with the matter. The report said AWS suffered a 13-hour interruption to a system used by customers when engineers allowed its Kiro ⁠AI coding tool to carry out certain changes. The agentic tool, which is capable of ⁠taking autonomous actions for users, decided to "delete and recreate the environment", according to the FT report. "That event interrupted an AWS feature - a single service used for cost management - not AWS generally," the Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement, adding that the event impacted a system used by customers to monitor usage costs in one of its 39 regions. The ⁠spokesperson called the disruption brief and attributed it to user error. The service interruption was an "extremely limited event" when a single service in one of the two regions in mainland China was affected, he added.

AWS Outage Was 'Not AI' Caused Via Kiro Coding Tool, Amazon Confirms

Amazon Web Servies is denying a report that alleges an AWS outage in December was caused by its own Kiro AI tool making the error. Amazon is denying a report that an AWS outage in December was caused by AWS engineers who allowed its own Kiro AI coding product to conduct changes, which spurred the cloud outage. "This brief event was the result of user error -- specifically misconfigured access controls -- not AI," said an AWS spokesperson in a statement to CRN. A recent report from the Financial Times said December's cloud outage stemmed from errors involving AWS' own AI tools, citing sources familiar with the incident. Specifically, AWS' agentic Kiro AI coding tool decided to autonomously "delete and re-create the environment," which spurred the AWS outage in late 2025, according to the report. [Related: Andy Jassy On AWS' $244B Backlog, Trainium4 And AI Chips Strategy] AWS denied that report, saying the outage was due to user errors based around misconfiguration of access controls. December's outage took down sites and services, including its own Amazon Alexa, Ring and Prime Video. AWS said it was a coincidence that AI tools were involved in December's outage, and "the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action." "The service interruption was an extremely limited event last year when a single service (AWS Cost Explorer -- which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our two Regions in Mainland China was affected," Amazon said. Amazon said its Kiro AI tool "requests authorization before taking action" by default, so AI did not bypass human engineers. "Kiro puts developers in control -- users need to configure which actions Kiro can take, and by default, Kiro requests authorization before taking any action," AWS told CRN. Launched in July, Kiro is an agentic coding service that works alongside users to turn prompts into detailed specs, then into working code, documents and tests. Kiro's agents aim to help customers solve problems and automate tasks like generating documentation and unit tests. In a statement to CRN, AWS said the company has implemented numerous safeguards after December's cloud outage. "We implemented numerous additional safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access," Amazon said. "This event didn't impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run," Amazon added. AWS generated $35.6 billion in total sales during the fourth quarter of 2025, up 24 percent year over year. The Seattle-based cloud company's annual run rate is now $142 billion.

Amazon's cloud unit hit was hit by least two outages involving AI tools in December: FT - The Economic Times

The service interruption was an "extremely limited event" when a single service in one of the two regions in mainland China was affected, the spokesperson said, adding ⁠that it did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of AWS's services.Amazon's cloud unit suffered at least two outages in December stemming from errors involving its own AI tools, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. In ⁠mid-December, ⁠Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to a system used by customers when engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to carry out certain changes, the report said. According to the FT report, the agentic tool, which is capable ⁠of taking autonomous actions for users, decided to "delete and recreate the environment." An Amazon Web ⁠Services spokesperson told Reuters in an emailed response that the disruption was brief and attributed it to user error. "This brief event was the result of user error-specifically misconfigured access controls-not AI," the spokesperson said. The service interruption was an "extremely limited event" when a single service in one of the two regions in mainland China was affected, the spokesperson said, adding ⁠that it did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of AWS's services. In October, a major outage in Amazon's cloud service had caused a global disruption, affecting Amazon's own services and apps such as Reddit, Roblox, and Snapchat.

Amazon's cloud unit hit by outage involving AI tools in December

Feb 20 (Reuters) - Amazon's cloud unit AWS had suffered an outage impacting a cost-management feature in December, a spokesperson told Reuters on Friday. The Financial Times reported earlier that the service suffered two outages in December stemming from errors involving its own AI tools, citing people familiar with the matter. The report said AWS suffered a 13-hour interruption to a system used by customers when engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to carry out certain changes. The agentic tool, which is capable of taking autonomous actions for users, decided to "delete and recreate the environment", according to the FT report. "That event interrupted an AWS feature - a single service used for cost management - not AWS generally," the Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement, adding that the event impacted a system used by customers to monitor usage costs in one of its 39 regions. The spokesperson called the disruption brief and attributed it to user error. The service interruption was an "extremely limited event" when a single service in one of the two regions in mainland China was affected, he added. (Reporting by Ananya Palyekar, Abu Sultan in Bengaluru and Kanjyik Ghosh in Barcelona; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala)