What happened

An Amazon internal AI coding tools known as Kiro, described as an agent capable of taking autonomous actions on behalf of developers, was reportedly used to make changes to AWS Cost Explorer, a system used for cost management. 

According to multiple reports citing insiders, the agent independently decided to delete and recreate the environment, which resulted in a 13-hour service outage in which customers in one of AWS’s two mainland China regions were unable to visualise or manage their cloud costs and usage.

Why it happened

Amazon’s official response to media coverage was that the outage resulted from misconfigured access controls rather than an inherent fault in the AI tool, asserting the event was limited and did not affect compute, storage, databases, or broader AWS infrastructure. 

The company highlighted that Kiro normally requires authorisation before taking action and said it has since implemented additional safeguards, including peer reviews. 

However, critics and AWS employees saw it as a combination of over-automation and poor governance, with a corporate culture increasingly pushing for the rapid adoption of AI technologies without having established the necessary "guardrails" for autonomous agents operating in live production environments, and that the broader integration of autonomous AI into systems previously reserved for human engineers increased systemic risk and blurred accountability.