AWS Outages Linked to AI Tools: Two Major Incidents Affect Amazon Services

Recent Amazon Outages Linked to AI Tools

• Two recent AWS outages attributed to misconfigured AI tools
• Amazon clarifies that the incidents stemmed from “user error, not AI error”
• The company has instituted “numerous safeguards” following these events

Amazon has reported that at least two outages of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) were caused by issues involving its own AI coding tools.

A December 2025 report by the Financial Times revealed a 13-hour outage in mid-December was triggered by Amazon’s Kiro AI coding agent, which mistakenly deleted and recreated the server environment.

While AWS created an internal report detailing the cause of the incident, it was not made public; however, the FT obtained information from four anonymous sources knowledgeable about the issue.

Although Amazon’s AI tools were implicated in the outage, the company asserted that “user error, not AI error” was the main factor, citing misconfigured access controls as the root cause.

“The engineers allowed the AI [agent] to resolve an issue without any oversight,” one source stated to the FT. “The outages were small but completely predictable.”

Amazon characterized this event as an “extremely limited incident,” yet another outage lasting 15 hours in October 2025 had significant repercussions, affecting public applications and websites.

In this case as well, sources from the FT indicated that incorrect permissions were to blame. The AI tools had been granted the same permissions as human employees, and their outputs were not subjected to the level of approval typically required for human-generated work.

Despite the evident risks, sources indicate that Amazon aims for an 80% adoption rate of AI among its developers, measured by usage once per week—a target that could potentially increase as usage grows.

In light of the AI-related outages, Amazon remarked: “Following the December incident, AWS established numerous safeguards to prevent recurrence.”

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