- At least two recent issues at Amazon were caused by misconfigured users and AI tools
- Amazon says incidents were ‘user error, not AI error’
- The company has put in place “numerous guarantees”
At least two recent AWS downtime issues were caused by incidents involving user error with Amazon’s own AI coding tools.
A report from Financial Times (FT) notes that a 13-hour outage in mid-December 2025 was the result of user error with Amazon’s Kiro AI coding agent.
Although AWS released an internal report on the cause of the problem, it was never shared publicly, but the FT obtained information from four anonymous people familiar with the matter.
AI problems
Although Amazon’s AI tools were partly to blame for the issues, the company stressed that “user error, not AI error” was the ultimate cause, attributing the problem to misconfigured access controls.
“The engineers let the A.I. [agent] solve a problem without intervention”, one of the FT»wrote the sources. “The outages were mild but entirely predictable,” with Amazon describing this particular incident as an “extremely limited event.”
Once again, the FTSources suggest that incorrect permissions were to blame, with AI tools having the same permissions as human workers and their results not receiving the same approval as would usually be the case with human workers.
Despite the very obvious dangers, the anonymous sources indicated that Amazon was aiming for an 80% AI adoption rate among its developers, based on once-a-week usage. A goal that could increase as adoption increases.
“This brief event was the result of user error, specifically misconfigured access controls, and not AI,” an AWS spokesperson told TechRadar Pro. “The service outage was an extremely limited event last year when only one service (AWS Cost Explorer, which helps customers view, understand and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our two mainland China regions was affected.
“This event did not impact compute, storage, databases, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services we manage. Following these events, we have implemented many additional safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access. Kiro puts control in the hands of developers: users must configure the actions Kiro can take, and by default, Kiro requests permission before taking any action.”
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