{"id":497699,"date":"2026-02-22T23:40:18","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T23:40:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/497699\/"},"modified":"2026-02-22T23:40:18","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T23:40:18","slug":"amazon-blames-human-employees-for-an-ai-coding-agents-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/497699\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent\u2019s mistake"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazon Web Services suffered a 13-hour outage to one system in December as a result of its AI coding assistant Kiro\u2019s actions, according to the Financial Times<\/a>. Numerous unnamed Amazon employees told the FT that AI agent Kiro was responsible for the December incident affecting an AWS service in parts of mainland China. People familiar with the matter said the tool chose to \u201cdelete and recreate the environment\u201d it was working on, which caused the outage.<\/p>\n

While Kiro normally requires sign-off from two humans to push changes, the bot had the permissions of its operator, and a human error there allowed more access than expected.<\/p>\n

Amazon described the December disruption as an \u201cextremely limited event\u201d that pales in comparison to a major outage in October<\/a>, which took down online services, like Alexa, Fortnite, ChatGPT, and Amazon for hours. An outage that didn\u2019t trap anyone in their smart bed<\/a> is something of a lucky escape.<\/p>\n

It is 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 the last few months, with another linked to Amazon\u2019s AI chatbot Q Developer. The employee described the outages as \u201csmall but entirely foreseeable.\u201d Amazon said the second incident did not impact a \u201ccustomer facing AWS service.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amazon blames human error for the problems, not the rogue bot, and said it has \u201cimplemented numerous safeguards\u201d like staff training following the incident. The company said it\u2019s a \u201ccoincidence that AI tools were involved\u201d and insists that \u201cthe same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action.\u201d That\u2019s true, and though I\u2019m not an engineer, I\u2019d guess one wouldn\u2019t deliberately scrap and rebuild something to make a change in all but the most dire of circumstances.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amazon Web Services suffered a 13-hour outage to one system in December as a result of its AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497700,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,2574,254,255,64,63,44,1996,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-497699","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-amazon","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-au","13":"tag-australia","14":"tag-news","15":"tag-tech","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}