Amazon’s cloud was hit by two outages involving AI tools in December, FT says

(Corrects to drop extraneous words in the headline)

Feb 20 (Reuters) – 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.

(Reporting by Ananya Palyekar and Abu Sultan in Bengaluru; Editing by Mrigank Dhaniwala)