Amazon Disputes Report an AWS Service Was Taken Down By Its AI Coding Bot

Source: Slashdot

Background

On Friday, Amazon published a blog post to address inaccuracies in a Financial Times report that claimed the company’s AI tool Kiro caused two outages in an AWS service in December. The original report can be found on Slashdot and the Amazon blog post is titled “to address the inaccuracies”.

Amazon’s Response

• Amazon states that the brief and extremely limited service interruption was the result of user error—specifically misconfigured access controls—not AI, as the story claimed.
• The claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false.

Details of the Incident

• The disruption occurred in December and affected a single service: AWS Cost Explorer, which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time.
• It impacted only one of Amazon’s 39 geographic regions and did not affect compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services Amazon runs.
• The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role—a problem that could arise with any developer tool (AI‑powered or not) or manual action.

Follow‑up Actions

• No customer inquiries were received regarding the interruption.
• Amazon implemented numerous safeguards to prevent recurrence, including mandatory peer review for production access.
• While misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool, Amazon emphasizes the importance of learning from these experiences to improve security and resilience.