Amazon has recently endured a period of service outages, fueled by two outages associated with its Kiro AI coding assistant, which it launched in July 2025. Although intended to perform tasks autonomously, these AI coding agents have raised concerns about their reliability.
Kiro AI’s Role in Amazon Outages
An internal Amazon assessment revealed that an outage in December lasted approximately 13 hours and affected AWS Cost Explorer in a region in mainland China.
The widespread blackout marked the second time in two months that Amazon’s AI tools were involved in a service outage.
While the e-commerce juggernaut described the December event as “extremely limited,” it did not affect critical services such as computing, storage or databases, as reported by Amazon employees.
Reports indicated that the Kiro tool attempted to “delete and recreate the environment”, a claim that Amazon refutes by saying that the problem stemmed from a misconfigured role rather than the AI itself: the engineer involved was given permission to implement changes without further approval. This indicates a potential managerial oversight.
Implications for AI coding tools
These distortions illustrate the challenges tech giants face in managing AI coding agents. While these tools can simplify workflows, they also introduce risks.
One notable case involved an AI agent deleting an entire database without the user’s consent. In light of discussions on platforms like Reddit, the accountability of engineers when using AI tools is becoming an extreme concern.
With AI coding agents gaining popularity, it is important for companies like Amazon to establish effective safeguards to minimize risks associated with autonomous coding.
