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AI code wreaked havoc with Amazon outage, and now the company is making tight rules
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/ai-code-wreaked-havoc-with-amazon-outage-and-now-the-company-is-making-tight-rules/AI code wreaked havoc with Amazon outage, and now the company is making tight rules
Turns out, giving an AI tool the keys to your infrastructure and walking away isn't a great idea.
By Rachit Agarwal Published March 11, 2026
-snip-
As reported by the Financial Times, Amazon Web Services suffered a 13-hour outage in December after engineers let its Kiro AI coding tool update code without requiring any oversight. Kiro decided the best solution was to “delete and recreate the environment.” That’s one way to fix a problem, I suppose.
-snipping to get to later incidents-
Business Insider obtained internal documents that paint a clearer picture of what actually happened. On March 2, 2026, Amazon’s AI coding tools contributed to an incident that caused 120,000 lost orders and 1.6 million website errors.
Three days later, on March 5, 2026, a separate outage caused a 99% drop in orders across North American marketplaces, resulting in 6.3 million lost orders. That’s a number that will surely show on the bottom line of a financial sheet, even for a company as big as Amazon.
Amazon is now rolling out a 90-day safety reset targeting around 335 critical systems. Engineers must get two people to review changes before deployment, use a formal documentation and approval process, and follow stricter automated checks.
-snip-
Turns out, giving an AI tool the keys to your infrastructure and walking away isn't a great idea.
By Rachit Agarwal Published March 11, 2026
-snip-
As reported by the Financial Times, Amazon Web Services suffered a 13-hour outage in December after engineers let its Kiro AI coding tool update code without requiring any oversight. Kiro decided the best solution was to “delete and recreate the environment.” That’s one way to fix a problem, I suppose.
-snipping to get to later incidents-
Business Insider obtained internal documents that paint a clearer picture of what actually happened. On March 2, 2026, Amazon’s AI coding tools contributed to an incident that caused 120,000 lost orders and 1.6 million website errors.
Three days later, on March 5, 2026, a separate outage caused a 99% drop in orders across North American marketplaces, resulting in 6.3 million lost orders. That’s a number that will surely show on the bottom line of a financial sheet, even for a company as big as Amazon.
Amazon is now rolling out a 90-day safety reset targeting around 335 critical systems. Engineers must get two people to review changes before deployment, use a formal documentation and approval process, and follow stricter automated checks.
-snip-
