Amazon Tightens Change Controls After Outages Linked to AI-Assisted Code Changes

Amazon leadership directed engineering teams to address a series of recent high-impact availability incidents that internal notes and reporting tied in part to “Gen-AI assisted changes,” citing that best practices and safeguards for these tools are not yet fully established. Following disruptions including a reported multi-hour impairment of the main retail site attributed to an erroneous code deployment, Amazon moved to tighten deployment governance by requiring senior engineer approval for AI-assisted changes and elevating attendance expectations for an operations review meeting led by SVP Dave Treadwell.

Reporting also linked at least two AWS operational incidents to the use of AI coding assistants being rolled out internally. One incident involved a prolonged interruption to an AWS cost calculator after an AI coding tool (reported as Kiro) made changes that resulted in deleting and recreating an environment; Amazon characterized that event as limited in scope and geography, and said another AI-linked incident did not impact a customer-facing AWS service. Separately, some engineers attributed increased severity-2 incident volume to staffing reductions, while Amazon disputed that layoffs were responsible for the outage pattern and described the availability review process as part of normal continuous improvement.