Amazon Web Services suffered a 13-hour outage on one system in December due to the actions of its AI coding assistant Kiro. according to the Financial times. Numerous unnamed Amazon employees told the story FT that AI agent Kiro was responsible for the December incident involving an AWS service in parts of mainland China. People familiar with the matter said the tool chose to “delete and recreate the environment” it was working on, causing the outage.
While Kiro normally needs the approval of two people to make changes, the bot had the operator’s permission, and human error allowed more access there than expected.
Amazon described the disruption in December as an “extremely limited event” that pales in comparison to a major outage in October that shut down online services like Alexa, Fortnite, ChatGPT and Amazon for hours. A glitch where no one ended up in their smart bed is a kind of lucky escape.
It’s not the only time AI coding tools have caused problems for Amazon. A senior AWS employee said the December outage is the second production outage linked to an AI tool in recent months, with another linked to Amazon’s Q Developer AI chatbot. The employee described the outage as “minor but completely foreseeable.” Amazon said the second incident did not impact any “customer-facing AWS service.”
Amazon blamed human error for the problems, not the rogue bot, and said it has “implemented numerous safety measures,” such as staff training after the incident. The company said it was “a coincidence that AI tools were involved” and emphasized that “the same problem could occur with any developer tool or manual action.” That’s true, and while I’m not an engineer, I don’t think you would deliberately demolish and rebuild something to make a change, except in the most dire of circumstances.
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