Two Amazon cloud outages in December triggered by AI tools, report says

Source: Mashable Tech

Background

As major companies around the world start incorporating AI into virtually all aspects of their operation, occasional hiccups are inevitable.

According to the Financial Times, Amazon experienced two minor outages in December, including a 13‑hour disruption in the middle of the month. The report attributes the cause to engineers allowing the agentic Kiro AI system to perform certain tasks, which led the AI to “delete and recreate the environment.”

This event was far smaller in scale than the major Amazon Web Services outage that occurred last October.

Amazon’s response

Amazon denies the AI‑related explanation. An AWS spokesperson told Reuters that the incidents were “brief events” caused by “user error,” not by AI itself. The spokesperson also noted that the December outages did not affect major infrastructural services in the way the October outage did.

Broader context of recent outages

High‑profile outages have become more common across the internet. Recent incidents include:

• YouTube’s brief global outage
• Verizon
• Cloudflare
• Microsoft 365
• Google Cloud Platform
• Microsoft Azure
• TikTok

Experts disagree on whether internet outages are becoming more frequent, but one fact is clear: as websites and apps increasingly rely on a small number of cloud providers—including Amazon Web Services—a single outage can have widespread, cascading effects across the internet.

Update

Feb. 20, 2026, 12:36 p.m. EST – The story has been updated to clarify that Amazon attributes the December outages to human error rather than AI.