In wake of outage, Amazon calls upon senior engineers to address issues created by 'Gen-AI assisted changes,' report claims — recent 'high blast radius' incidents stir up changes for code approval

Source: Tom’s Hardware

Image credit: Getty / Caroline Brehman

Amazon allegedly called its engineers to a meeting to discuss several recent incidents that had a “high blast radius” and were related to “Gen‑AI assisted changes.” According to the Financial Times, one of the contributing factors listed in the meeting notes was the use of generative AI tools “for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

Recent incidents

• A six‑hour disruption on Amazon’s main retail website prevented customers from viewing product details and completing transactions. The company attributed the outage to erroneous code deployment.
• Reports that Amazon’s AI shopping assistant could be easily jailbroken to answer non‑shopping queries. (Tom’s Hardware report)
• Outages in Amazon Web Services (AWS) linked to AI‑generated code. (Tom’s Hardware report)

Company response

“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Amazon Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell allegedly wrote in an email. He said the meeting would take a “deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate‑term initiatives,” and announced that AI‑assisted changes must now be approved by senior engineers before deployment. Attendance, usually optional, was made mandatory for this session.

Broader implications

While generative AI offers valuable applications—particularly in specialized fields like medical research—it still requires careful oversight, and its output cannot be relied upon 100 % of the time. Overselling AI capabilities has led many CEOs to miss the promised benefits of higher revenues and reduced costs. See the analysis on AI adoption outcomes: More than half of CEOs report seeing no benefits from AI deployment.