Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.
The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment”.
Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the “outage” of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services.
Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group’s AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.
Rafe Rosner-Uddin
Not surprising that these kinds of outages happen when you hand over operations to unreliable systems without proper controls. Having invested astronomical amounts in AI technologies, management is all too eager to expand their use and to demonstrate tangible return-on-investment — beyond the cost reductions from constant layoffs. The rapid and uncontrolled push for AI in critical software infrastructure has been blamed for the multiple bugs in Windows updates over the past year as well; Microsoft even officially admitted some of the issues and committed to working on fixes.
Amazon has pushed back on this piece of reporting, stating that the brief service interruption they reported on was the result of user error—specifically misconfigured access controls—not AI
. One might say that the company rushing to publish this correction in a rather testy tone is a sign that the article struck a nerve and might have more truth to it than Amazon is willing to admit.
Leaving aside what actually happened in this specific case, the strong online reaction and how people reflexively blame AI for a wide crop of software failures reveals that AI has a massive public image problem. It has become associated with greedy executives wanting to force this untested and power-intensive technology on everyone else, while firing their employees to keep all the proceeds for themselves. It also doesn’t help that the same small group of tech executives are courting the Trump administration, seeking more tax cuts, regulation rollbacks, and tariff exemptions. This negative perception is another factor that could slow AI adoption and force companies to ultimately scale back their inflated plans and ambitions for the technology.
Post a Comment