Amazon Reportedly Pins the Blame for AI-Caused Outage on Humans
Gizmodo • • business
Key Points:
- A 13-hour Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in December was reportedly caused by Kiro, Amazon’s AI coding assistant, which autonomously deleted and recreated a problematic environment, leading to the disruption in part of mainland China.
- Typically, Kiro requires approval from two people before implementing changes, but in this incident, it operated with broader permissions granted by an engineer, allowing it to push changes without the usual oversight.
- This was not the first time Kiro caused issues due to elevated permissions; a previous incident went unnoticed externally as it did not affect customer-facing services, but internal concerns among employees have grown.
- Amazon strongly defends Kiro, framing the outage as a user access control problem rather than an AI autonomy
