Amazon hits back at Financial Times report blaming AI coding tools for AWS outages – GeekWire
Seven hours at the top of Techmeme was apparently too much for Amazon to take.
The cloud division of the tech giant, Amazon Web Services, issued a rare public rebuttal Friday afternoon to a widely cited Financial Times report that claims Amazon’s AI coding tools have caused at least two AWS outages in recent months.
The story has been picked up by many media outlets, and a widely followed tech news aggregator, as an example of the dangers of using agent AI tools, and the fundamental question of who – or what – is responsible when something goes wrong.
In a blog post titled “Fixing a Financial Times report about AWS, Kiro, and AI,” Amazon acknowledged a limited disruption to one service in one location last December but said it was due to user error in configuring access controls, not a fault in the AI tool itself.
“The issue stems from a poorly configured role—a similar issue that can occur with any developer tool (AI enabled or not) or manual action,” Amazon said, noting that it had received no customer inquiries about the glitch.
In addition, the company wrote, “The claim by the Financial Times that the second event affected AWS is completely false.”
This is where it comes into semantics, the key phrase “AWS impact.” In fact, the FT reported that Amazon itself has acknowledged the second incident but said it does not affect “AWS’s customer-facing service.”
In other words, if the incident does not affect the service used by customers, does it count as an outage? FT called one. Amazon doesn’t think clearly. And this is ultimately the crux of the argument.
As for the suspected outage affecting AWS, the FT report cited four people familiar with the matter as describing a 13-hour outage in AWS’s system in mid-December.
Sources said developers allowed Amazon’s Kiro AI coding tool — an agent assistant capable of taking autonomous actions — to make the changes, and that the tool determined the best way to “remove and recreate the environment.”
Several Amazon employees told the publication that it was the second time in recent months that AI tools have been involved in service disruptions. According to the FT report, a senior AWS employee said the outage was “minor but completely noticeable,” adding that developers had allowed an AI agent to solve problems without human intervention.
AWS is the most profitable division of Amazon. It generated $35.6 billion in revenue last quarter, up 24%, and $12.5 billion in operating income. The cloud unit is a major focus of the company’s planned spending of $200 billion this year, much of which is directed toward AI infrastructure.
In addition to using agent tools in its operations, Amazon sells them to AWS customers, making any narrative about AI-induced outages unacceptable.
Amazon’s main defense – that the December incident was “user error, not AI error” – was already included in the original FT story. The blog post primarily restates that position in a prominent and direct manner.
“We have not received any customer inquiries about the disruption,” Amazon wrote in response. “We have implemented many safeguards to prevent this from happening again—not because the event had a major impact (it didn’t), but because we insist that we learn from our experience in operation to improve our safety and resilience.”
Amazon said the disruption was limited to AWS Cost Explorer, a tool that allows customers to track their cloud usage, in one of its 39 regions. Reuters and The Verge reported that the affected region is in China, citing an Amazon spokesperson. It does not affect critical resources such as computing, storage, or databases, the company said.
The company added that it has implemented new safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access.
Posting on X, New York Times reporter Mike Isaac called Amazon’s response “the worst” he has seen from Amazon in years, comparing it to a previous period when former White House press secretary Jay Carney, who led the company’s public policy, was more vocal in its defense.
