Amazon allegedly called its engineers to a meeting to discuss several recent incidents, with the briefing note saying that these had “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.”
There has been a spate of problems in Amazon’s operations recently, including a six-hour disruption on its main retail website, wherein customers were unable to see details and complete transactions, which the company said is attributed to erroneous code deployment. We’ve also seen reports that Amazon’s AI assistant could be easily jailbroken to answer questions unrelated to shopping, as well as reports of AI coding bot-driven outages with AWS, the company’s cloud service.
“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 said in an email, according to the publication. He also said that the meeting will take a “deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives,” and that AI-assisted changes must now be approved by senior engineers before deployment. This meeting is reportedly usually optional, but it seems that Treadwell asked the staff to be in attendance this time.
Amazon hasn’t officially confirmed the cause of all its woes, but the details shared in this meeting seemingly point to the use of AI. “TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store," an Amazon spokesperson told Tom's Hardware. "As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and app as we focus on continual improvement.” It also isn’t the first big tech company to take things seriously after many firms took the “move fast and break things” motto literally when it came to generative AI. Microsoft said in late January 2026 that it’s working to fix many of Windows 11's flaws and restore its reputation. This came nine months after CEO Satya Nadella said that AI writes up to 30% of the company’s code, with some projects completely coded by AI.
While generative AI does have its uses, especially in specialized fields like medical research, it still needs observation, and we still cannot rely on its output 100% of the time. Unfortunately, many are overselling the capabilities of this tool, and many CEOs aren’t getting the promised benefits of higher revenues and reduced costs.
