Report: AI coding tools caused outages at Amazon
Following outages in March, Amazon is introducing stricter controls for AI-generated code. Internal reports cite a lack of security mechanisms as the cause.
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The use of AI coding tools is said to have led to outages on Amazon's e-commerce platform. According to a report, a previously voluntary weekly meeting has been repurposed for this, which all involved developers must attend. A first result: In the future, AI-assisted code changes will only be approved after review by experienced personnel.
In early March, there were outages lasting almost six hours on Amazon.com and in the shopping app. According to the report, customers were unable to make purchases or retrieve their data or prices. A faulty software update was officially cited as the cause.
Individual errors with far-reaching consequences
According to internal documents, AI-generated changes triggered the problems, the Financial Times reported, citing unnamed sources within the company. Best practices and security mechanisms for the use of generative AI were lacking. Individual errors therefore led to far-reaching consequential damage. Almost a year and a half ago, it became public that Amazon now expects software developers to use AI for many programming tasks.
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In addition to the shopping site, Amazon's cloud division, AWS, has also experienced issues with AI coding assistants in at least two cases. In December, for example, Amazon's own AI tool “Kiro” independently deleted a production environment and recreated it. The consequence was a 13-hour outage of a cost calculator for AWS customers. Amazon itself only spoke of a very small issue that affected only a single service in parts of China.
Internally, there are discussions whether the job cuts at Amazon are also contributing to the problems. Amazon had parted ways with 16,000 employees. Since then, the number of critical issues has increased, developers report according to the FT. Amazon itself denies any connection. The measures taken are also “normal business operations” and part of continuous improvement.
(mki)
