Key Moments
- Amazon Web Services encountered at least two December outages tied to its own AI tools, according to a Financial Times report.
- A 13-hour mid-December disruption reportedly followed changes executed by AWS’s Kiro AI coding tool, which “decided to ‘delete and recreate the environment.'”
- AWS characterized the affected incident as a brief, user-driven misconfiguration impacting a single service in one of two mainland China regions.
Report Details on December AI-Related Outages
Amazon’s cloud division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), was hit by at least two service disruptions in December that were tied to mistakes involving its own artificial intelligence tools, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the situation.
The FT report stated that in mid-December AWS suffered a 13-hour outage on a system used by customers after engineers permitted its Kiro AI coding tool to implement certain changes. The tool was described as an agentic system capable of performing autonomous actions on behalf of users.
According to the Financial Times account, the AI agent “decided to ‘delete and recreate the environment.'”
AWS Response and Characterization of the Incident
An AWS spokesperson, in an emailed statement to Reuters, said the incident was short-lived and attributed it to human error rather than an AI failure.
“This brief event was the result of user error—specifically misconfigured access controls—not AI,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson also described the service impact as an “extremely limited event” that affected only a single service in one of the two AWS regions in mainland China. The spokesperson added that there was no impact on compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other AWS services.
Context of Earlier AWS Disruption
The December problems followed an earlier major outage in October involving Amazon’s cloud platform. That earlier disruption caused widespread issues globally, affecting Amazon’s own services as well as third-party applications including Reddit, Roblox, and Snapchat.
Incident Summary
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Number of December outages | At least two (per Financial Times) |
| Key mid-December event duration | 13 hours |
| Tool involved | Kiro AI coding tool (agentic, autonomous actions) |
| Reported AI action | Decided to “delete and recreate the environment” |
| AWS stated cause | “User error—specifically misconfigured access controls—not AI” |
| Geographic scope (per AWS) | Single service in one of two mainland China regions |
| Services reportedly not affected | Compute, storage, database, AI technologies, and other AWS services |
| Earlier related context | October major cloud outage affecting Amazon services and apps such as Reddit, Roblox, and Snapchat |
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