Amazon recently suffered a period of service disruption, driven by two outages related to its Kiro AI coding assistant, which it launched in July 2025. While they are 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 of mainland China.
The widespread outage marked the second time in two months that Amazon’s artificial intelligence tools were involved in a service outage.
While the e-commerce giant described the December event as “extremely limited,” it did not affect critical services such as computing, storage or databases, Amazon employees reported.
Reports indicated that the Kiro tool attempted to “remove and recreate the environment,” a claim that Amazon refutes by stating that the issue was due to a misconfigured feature and not the AI itself – the engineer involved was given permission to implement changes without additional approval. This indicates possible management oversight.
Implications for AI coding tools
These distortions illustrate the challenges that 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 user consent. In light of debates on platforms like Reddit, the liability of engineers when using AI tools is becoming an extreme concern.
With AI encryption agents gaining popularity, it is important for companies like Amazon to establish effective guardrails to minimize the risks associated with autonomous encryption.
