- At least two recent Amazon problems were caused by users and misconfigured AI tools
- Amazon claims incidents were ‘user error, not AI error’
- The company has implemented “many security measures”
At least two recent AWS downtime issues were caused by incidents involving user error with Amazon’s own AI coding tools.
A report from Financial Times (FT) notes that a 13-hour outage in mid-December 2025 was the result of user error with Amazon’s Kiro AI encoding agent.
Although AWS had published an internal report on the cause of the problem, it was never shared publicly, but FT has obtained the information from four unnamed people familiar with the matter.
AI problems
Although Amazon’s own AI tools were partly responsible for the problems, the company stressed that “user error, not AI error” was the ultimate cause, attributing the problem to misconfigured access controls.
“The engineers let the AI [agent] solve a problem without intervention,” one of them FTwrote ‘s sources. “The outages were small but entirely predictable,” – with Amazon describing this particular incident as an “extremely limited event.”
Again, that one FT‘s sources suggest that 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 normally be the case with human workers.
Despite very clear dangers, the unnamed sources shared that Amazon is aiming for an 80% AI adoption rate among its developers, based on once a week. A target that can increase as adoption increases.
“This brief incident was the result of user error — specifically, misconfigured access controls — not AI,” an AWS spokesperson told TechRadar Pro. “The service outage was an extremely limited event last year where 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 China was affected.
“This incident did not affect compute, storage, database, AI technologies or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. Following these incidents, we implemented several additional security measures, including mandatory peer review for production access. Kiro puts developers in control – users must configure what actions Kiro can perform, and by default Kiro requests authorization before any action is taken.”
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