Amazon's cloud unit hit by outage involving AI tools in December

Amazon's cloud unit AWS had suffered ​an outage impacting a cost-management feature in December, a spokesperson told Reuters on Friday.

The Financial Times reported ‌earlier that ⁠the ⁠service suffered two outages in December stemming from errors ​involving its own AI tools, citing people familiar with the ​matter.

The report said AWS suffered a 13-hour interruption to a system used by customers ​when engineers allowed its Kiro ⁠AI coding tool ‌to carry out certain ​changes.


The agentic ​tool, which is capable of ⁠taking autonomous actions for users, decided to "delete and ​recreate the environment", according to the ​FT report.

"That event interrupted an AWS feature - a single service used for cost management - not AWS generally," the Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement, adding that the ‌event impacted a system used by customers to monitor usage costs in one ​of its ​39 regions.

The ⁠spokesperson called the disruption brief and attributed it to user error. The service interruption was an "extremely limited event" ​when a single service in one of the two regions in mainland China was affected, he added.