Amazon recently experienced a period of service interruption, caused by two outages related to its Kiro AI coding assistant, which launched in July 2025. Although they are supposed to perform tasks autonomously, these AI coding agents have raised concerns about their reliability.
Kiro AI’s role in Amazon outages
An internal Amazon assessment found that a December outage lasted approximately 13 hours and affected AWS Cost Explorer in a region of mainland China.
The widespread outage marked the second time in two months that Amazon’s AI tools were involved in a service interruption.
Although the e-commerce giant described the December event as “extremely limited,” it did not impact critical services like compute, storage, or databases, as Amazon employees reported.
Reports indicate that the Kiro tool attempted to “delete and recreate the environment,” a claim that Amazon refutes by saying the problem stemmed from a misconfigured role rather than the AI itself: the engineer involved was given permission to deploy the changes without additional approval. This indicates a possible oversight by management.
Implications for AI coding tools
These distortions illustrate the challenges tech giants face in managing AI coding agents. While these tools can simplify workflows, they also pose risks.
One notable case involved an AI agent that deleted an entire database without user consent. In light of discussions on platforms like Reddit, the liability of engineers when using AI tools is becoming an extreme concern.
As AI coding agents gain popularity, it is important for companies like Amazon to establish effective guardrails to minimize the risks associated with autonomous coding.
