Amazon pushes back on Financial Times report blaming AI coding tools for AWS outages

Seven hours at the top of Techmeme was apparently too much for Amazon to take.

The tech giant’s cloud division, Amazon Web Services, issued an unusually pointed public rebuttal Friday afternoon to a widely cited Financial Times report asserting that Amazon’s own AI coding tools have caused at least two AWS outages in recent months. 

The story was picked up by numerous media outlets, and the widely followed tech news aggregator, as an example of the risks of deploying agentic AI tools, and the underlying question of who — or what —  is responsible when something goes wrong.

In a blog post titled “Correcting the Financial Times report about AWS, Kiro, and AI,” Amazon acknowledged a limited disruption to a single service in one region last December but attributed it to a user error in configuring access controls, not a flaw in the AI tool itself.

“The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role—the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action,” Amazon said, noting that it received no customer inquiries about the disruption.

In addition, the company wrote, “The Financial Times’ claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false.”

The FT reported that Amazon itself acknowledged a second incident but said it did not affect a “customer-facing AWS service.”

[Update: Following publication, an AWS spokesperson told GeekWire that the second event referenced in the FT’s report did not take place within the AWS business, but elsewhere within Amazon. The FT’s reporting is wrong on this point, the spokesperson said.]

As for the undisputed outage impacting AWS, the FT’s report cited four people familiar with the matter in describing a 13-hour interruption to an AWS system in mid-December. 

The sources said engineers had allowed Amazon’s Kiro AI coding tool — an agentic assistant capable of taking autonomous actions — to make changes, and that the tool determined the best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment.”

Multiple Amazon employees told the publication that it was the second time in recent months that AI tools had been involved in a service disruption. According to the FT report, a senior AWS employee said the outages were “small but entirely foreseeable,” adding that engineers had let the AI agent resolve issues without human intervention.

AWS is Amazon’s most profitable division. It generated $35.6 billion in revenue last quarter, up 24%, and $12.5 billion in operating income. The cloud unit is a significant focus of the company’s planned $200-billion capital spending spree this year, much of it directed toward AI infrastructure.

In addition to using agentic tools in its own operations, Amazon is selling them to AWS customers, making any narrative about AI-caused outages particularly unwelcome.

Amazon’s core defense — that the December incident was “user error, not AI error” — was already included in the FT’s original story. The blog post largely restates that position in a more prominent and pointed way.

“We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption,” Amazon wrote in its response. “We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again—not because the event had a big impact (it didn’t), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience.”

Amazon said the disruption was limited to AWS Cost Explorer, a tool that lets customers track their cloud spending, in one of its 39 geographic regions. The affected region was in mainland China, as Reuters and The Verge also reported. It did not affect core services such as compute, storage, or databases, the company said.

The company added that it has since implemented new safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access.

Posting on X, New York Times reporter Mike Isaac called the Amazon response “the most prickly” he’d seen from Amazon in years, comparing it to the past era when former White House press secretary Jay Carney, who led public policy for the company, spoke out strongly in its defense.