Amazon cloud unit hit by least two outages involving AI tools in December: Report

Amazon’s cloud ​unit suffered at least two outages in ‌December stemming from errors involving its ​own AI tools, the ⁠Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.

In mid-December, Amazon ‌Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to a system used ‌by customers when engineers allowed its ‌Kiro ⁠AI coding tool to ⁠carry out certain changes, the report said.

According to the FT report, the agentic tool, which ​is capable of ‌taking autonomous actions for users, decided to “delete and recreate the environment.”

An Amazon Web Services spokesperson told ‌Reuters in an emailed response that ​the disruption was brief and attributed it to user error.

“This ⁠brief event was the result of user error-specifically misconfigured access controls—not AI,” ‌the spokesperson said.

The service interruption was an “extremely limited event” when a single service in one of the two regions in mainland China was affected, the spokesperson said, ‌adding that it did not impact compute, ​storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of AWS’s services.

In October, ⁠a major outage in Amazon’s cloud ⁠service had caused a global disruption, affecting Amazon’s own services ‌and apps such as Reddit, Roblox, and Snapchat .