- At least two recent Amazon issues were caused by users and misconfigured AI tools
- Amazon asserts incidents were "user error, not AI error"
- The company has implemented "numerous safeguards"
At least two recent AWS downtime issues were caused by incidents involving user error with Amazon's own AI coding tools.
A report by the Financial Times (FT) notes a 13-hour interruption in mid-December 2025 was the result of a user error with Amazon's Kiro AI coding agent.
Although AWS had published an internal report on the cause of the issue, this was never shared publicly, but the FT has obtained the information from four unnamed people familiar with the matter.
AI issues
Though Amazon's own AI tools were partly responsible for the issues, the company did stress that "user error, not AI error" was the ultimate cause, attributing the problem to misconfigured access controls.
"The engineers let the AI [agent] resolve an issue without intervention," one of the FT's sources wrote. "The outages were small but entirely foreseeable," - with Amazon describing this particular incident as an "extremely limited event."
Again, the FT's sources suggest incorrect permissions were to blame, with the AI tools given the same permissions as human workers and its output not given the same approval as would usually be the case with human workers.
Despite very clear dangers, the unnamed sources shared that Amazon is targeting an 80% AI adoption rate among its developers, based on once-per-week usage. A target that could increase as adoption rises.
“This brief event was the result of user error—specifically misconfigured access controls—not AI," an AWS spokesperson told TechRadar Pro. "The service interruption was an extremely limited event last year when a single service (AWS Cost Explorer—which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our two Regions in Mainland China was affected.
"This event didn’t impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. Following these events, we implemented numerous additional safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access. Kiro puts developers in control—users need to configure which actions Kiro can take, and by default, Kiro requests authorization before taking any action.”
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