A latest Amazon Net Companies (AWS) outage that lasted 13 hours was reportedly brought on by certainly one of its personal AI instruments, in response to reporting by Monetary Instances. This occurred in December after engineers deployed the Kiro AI coding instrument to make sure adjustments, say 4 individuals aware of the matter.
Kiro is an agentic instrument, which means it may well take autonomous actions on behalf of customers. On this case, the bot reportedly decided that it wanted to “delete and recreate the atmosphere.” That is what allegedly led to the prolonged outage that primarily impacted China.
Amazon says it was merely a “coincidence that AI instruments have been concerned” and that “the identical concern may happen with any developer instrument or guide motion.” The corporate blamed the outage on “consumer error, not AI error.” It mentioned that by default the Kiro instrument “requests authorization earlier than taking any motion” however that the staffer concerned within the December incident had “broader permissions than anticipated — a consumer entry management concern, not an AI autonomy concern.”
A number of Amazon staff spoke to Monetary Instances and famous that this was “not less than” the second event in latest months wherein the corporate’s AI instruments have been on the middle of a service disruption. “The outages have been small however solely foreseeable,” mentioned one senior AWS worker.
The corporate launched Kiro in July and has since pushed staff into utilizing the instrument. Management set an 80 % weekly use purpose and has been carefully monitoring adoption charges. Amazon additionally sells entry to the agentic instrument for a month-to-month subscription payment.
These latest outages observe a extra critical occasion from October, wherein a 15-hour AWS outage disrupted providers like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite and Venmo, amongst others. The corporate blamed a bug in its automation software program for that one.
Nevertheless, Amazon disagrees with the characterization of sure services and products being unavailable as an outage. In response to the Monetary Instances report, the corporate shared the next , which it additionally printed on its information weblog:
We wish to handle the inaccuracies within the yesterday. The temporary service interruption they reported on was the results of consumer error—particularly misconfigured entry controls—not AI because the story claims.
The disruption was an especially restricted occasion final December affecting a single service (AWS Value Explorer—which helps prospects visualize, perceive, and handle AWS prices and utilization over time) in certainly one of our 39 Geographic Areas all over the world. It didn’t affect compute, storage, database, AI applied sciences, or every other of the a whole lot of providers that we run. The difficulty stemmed from a misconfigured position—the identical concern that might happen with any developer instrument (AI powered or not) or guide motion. We didn’t obtain any buyer inquiries relating to the interruption. We applied quite a few safeguards to forestall this from occurring once more—not as a result of the occasion had a huge impact (it did not), however as a result of we insist on studying from our operational expertise to enhance our safety and resilience. Further safeguards embrace obligatory peer overview for manufacturing entry. Whereas operational incidents involving misconfigured entry controls can happen with any developer instrument—AI-powered or not—we expect it is very important study from these experiences. The Monetary Instances’ declare {that a} second occasion impacted AWS is solely false.
For greater than 20 years, Amazon has achieved excessive operational excellence with our Correction of Error (COE) course of. We overview these collectively in order that we are able to study from any incident, no matter buyer affect, to deal with points earlier than their potential affect grows bigger.
Replace, February 21 2026, 11:58AM ET: This story has been up to date to incorporate Amazon’s full assertion in response to the Monetary Instances report.
