Amazon's Kiro AI coding tool caused 13-hour AWS outage after deleting production environment

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.

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." ®

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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.