{"id":493151,"date":"2026-02-23T01:52:42","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T01:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/493151\/"},"modified":"2026-02-23T01:52:42","modified_gmt":"2026-02-23T01:52:42","slug":"amazon-reportedly-pins-the-blame-for-ai-caused-outage-on-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/493151\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon Reportedly Pins the Blame for AI-Caused Outage on Humans"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Amazon Web Services got hit by a 13-hour outage in December, it wasn\u2019t because a person tripped over a cord. According to a report from the Financial Times, several anonymous Amazon employees said that the outage was the fault of Kiro, Amazon\u2019s AI coding assistant\u2014though Amazon<\/a> reportedly blamed human error for the situation.<\/p>\n

According to the accounts given to the Financial Times<\/a>, Kiro was working autonomously when it came across an issue. It decided that its best course of action was to \u201cdelete and recreate the environment\u201d that was causing problems. That, according to the accounts, led to the outage that Amazon described as an \u201cextremely limited event,\u201d ultimately knocking out service in one part of mainland China.<\/p>\n

Under typical circumstances, Kiro requires two people to approve of its proposed changes before moving forward. But in this case, the AI agent was reportedly working with an engineer who had broader permissions than lower-ranking employees, and Kiro was being treated as an extension of an operator. As a result, it was given the same permissions as a person and was allowed to push the change without approval, which led to the outage.<\/p>\n

It also apparently wasn\u2019t the first time that this has happened. Per FT, it is at least the second incident in which Kiro was given additional free rein and ultimately buffed it. The prior situation didn\u2019t affect any \u201ccustomer-facing AWS service,\u201d so it went unnoticed to the world outside of AWS. But employees seem to be taking notice.<\/p>\n

Amazon has pushed Kiro hard since it introduced the coding assistant back in July, reportedly offering guidance to employees<\/a> that they use the internal tool over outside options like OpenAI\u2019s Codex, Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code, or Cursor\u2014apparently to the chagrin of engineers<\/a>, who would prefer to use tools like Claude.<\/p>\n

Perhaps then it\u2019s not surprising that Amazon is particularly defensive of its precious baby Kiro. According to the Financial Times<\/a>, the company described the outage incident as \u201ca user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue,\u201d and said that it was just a \u201ccoincidence that AI tools were involved\u201d because \u201cthe same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action.\u201d The latter part is true; a person could have made the same error. The thing is, though, that they didn\u2019t. It was an AI agent that allegedly had an unexpected level of access to the company\u2019s code base and made a boo-boo.<\/p>\n

Amazon has reportedly told employees that it wants to get 80% of its developers using AI for coding tasks at least once a week. If you find yourself unable to log in to Spotify or Discord, just know that Amazon hit its goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Amazon Web Services got hit by a 13-hour outage in December, it wasn\u2019t because a person tripped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":493152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,9187,971,276,277,5875,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-493151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-ai-agent","tag-amazon","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-aws","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=493151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/493151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/493152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=493151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=493151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=493151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}