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.”