{"id":294044,"date":"2026-02-20T21:04:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-20T21:04:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/294044\/"},"modified":"2026-02-20T21:04:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-20T21:04:07","slug":"amazons-cloud-hit-by-two-outages-caused-by-ai-tools-last-year-amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/294044\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon\u2019s cloud \u2018hit by two outages caused by AI tools last year\u2019 | Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amazon\u2019s huge cloud computing arm reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools, raising questions about the company\u2019s embrace of AI<\/a> as it lays off human employees.<\/p>\n

A 13-hour interruption to Amazon<\/a> Web Services\u2019 (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent, Kiro, autonomously choosing to \u201cdelete and then recreate\u201d a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported.<\/p>\n

AWS, which provides vital infrastructure for much of the internet, suffered several outages<\/a> last year.<\/p>\n

One incident, in October, downed dozens of sites for hours and prompted discussion over the concentration of online services on infrastructure owned by a few massive companies. AWS has won 189 UK government contracts worth \u00a31.7bn since 2016, the Guardian reported<\/a> in October.<\/p>\n

The AI-caused outages were smaller events, said the company, and only one affected customer-facing services.<\/p>\n

Amazon confirmed plans to cut 16,000 jobs<\/a> in January, after it laid off 14,000 staff<\/a> last October. In January its chief executive, Andy Jassy, reportedly said these cuts were about company culture, and not about replacing workers with AI.<\/p>\n

However, Jassy has previously<\/a> said that efficiency gains from AI will reduce Amazon\u2019s workforce in the coming years, and AI agents will allow it to \u201cfocus less on rote work and more on thinking strategically about how to improve customer experiences\u201d.<\/p>\n

In a statement to the Financial Times, Amazon said it was a coincidence that AI tools were involved in the outages, and that there was no evidence that such technology led to more errors than human engineers. \u201cIn both instances, this was user error, not AI error,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n

Amazon told the Guardian that there was just one incident that had affected AWS, rather than two.<\/p>\n

Several experts were sceptical of this assessment. A security researcher, Jamieson O\u2019Reilly, said: \u201cWhile engineering errors caused by traditional tools and humans are not a rare occurrence, the difference between these and mishaps where AI is involved is that \u2018without\u2019 AI, a human typically needs to manually type out a set of instructions, and while doing so they have much more time to realise their own error.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI agents are often deployed in constrained environments and for specific tasks, O\u2019Reilly said, and cannot understand the broader ramifications of, for example, restarting a system or deleting a database \u2013 which may have led to the error at Amazon.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t have full visibility into the context in which they\u2019re running, how your customers might be affected or what the cost of downtime might be at 2am on a Tuesday,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got to continually remind these tools of the context \u2013 \u2018hey, this is serious, don\u2019t stuff this up\u2019. And if you don\u2019t do this, it starts to forget about all the other consequences.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, an AI agent designed<\/a> by the tech company Replit to build an app deleted an entire company database, fabricated reports, and then lied about its actions.<\/p>\n

Micha\u0142 Wo\u017aniak, a cybersecurity expert, said it would be nearly impossible for Amazon to completely prevent internal AI agents from making errors in future, because AI systems make unexpected choices and are extremely complex.<\/p>\n

\u201cAmazon never misses a chance to point to \u2018AI\u2019 when it is useful to them \u2013 like in the case of mass layoffs that are being framed as replacing engineers with AI. But when a slop generator is involved in an outage, suddenly that\u2019s just \u2018coincidence\u2019,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson from Amazon said: \u201cThis brief event was the result of user error \u2013 specifically misconfigured access controls \u2013 not AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

They said the \u201cservice interruption was an extremely limited event last year\u201d when a tool used to visualise costs for its customers was affected in parts of China.<\/p>\n

They added: \u201cThis event didn\u2019t impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run.<\/p>\n

\u201cFollowing these events, we implemented numerous additional safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access. Kiro puts developers in control \u2013 users need to configure which actions Kiro can take, and by default, Kiro requests authorisation before taking any action.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amazon\u2019s huge cloud computing arm reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294045,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,111,139,69,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-294044","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-new-zealand","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294044"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294044\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}