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.
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