{"id":467691,"date":"2026-03-10T11:40:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T11:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/467691\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T11:40:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T11:40:10","slug":"amazon-holds-engineering-meeting-following-ai-related-outages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/467691\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon holds engineering meeting following AI-related outages"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a \u201cdeep dive\u201d into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. <\/p>\n

The online retail giant said there had been a \u201ctrend of incidents\u201d in recent months, characterised by a \u201chigh blast radius\u201d and \u201cGen-AI assisted changes\u201d among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. <\/p>\n

Under \u201ccontributing factors\u201d the note included \u201cnovel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cFolks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,\u201d Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email, also seen by the FT.<\/p>\n

The note ahead of Tuesday\u2019s meeting did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss. <\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s website and shopping app went down for nearly six hours this month in an incident the company said involved an erroneous \u201csoftware code deployment\u201d. The outage left customers unable to complete transactions or access functions such as checking account details and product prices. <\/p>\n

Treadwell, a former Microsoft engineering executive, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly \u201cThis Week in Stores Tech\u201d (TWiST) meeting on a \u201cdeep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives\u201d the group hopes will limit future outages. <\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

He asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional. <\/p>\n

Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell added.<\/p>\n

Amazon said the review of website availability was \u201cpart of normal business\u201d and it aims for continual improvement.<\/p>\n

\u201cTWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store,\u201d the company said.<\/p>\n

Separately, the company\u2019s cloud computing arm \u2014 Amazon Web Services \u2014 has suffered at least two incidents linked to the use of AI coding assistants, which the company has been actively rolling out to its staff. <\/p>\n

AWS suffered a 13-hour interruption to a cost calculator used by customers in mid-December after engineers allowed the group\u2019s Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, and the AI tool opted to \u201cdelete and recreate the environment\u201d, the FT previously reported<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Amazon previously said the incident in December was an \u201cextremely limited event\u201d affecting only a single service in parts of mainland China. Amazon added that the second incident did not have an impact on a \u201ccustomer facing AWS service\u201d.<\/p>\n

The FT previously reported multiple Amazon engineers said their business units had to deal with a higher number of \u201cSev2s\u201d<\/a> \u2014 incidents requiring a rapid response to avoid product outages \u2014 each day as a result of job cuts.<\/p>\n

Amazon has undertaken multiple rounds of lay-offs in recent years, most recently eliminating 16,000 corporate roles<\/a> in January. The group has disputed the claim that headcount cuts were responsible for an increase in recent outages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":467692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-467691","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-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=467691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/467691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/467692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=467691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=467691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=467691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}