AWS outage caused by autonomous AI coding tool Kiro
Amazon AWS experienced at least one significant outage in December lasting 13 hours when its autonomous AI coding tool Kiro was allowed to delete and recreate an environment. The incident disrupted a cost management resource affecting customers in one of AWS's 39 regions. Amazon disputed reports of two separate AI-caused outages, attributing the incident to user error rather than AI malfunction.
What happened
A 13-hour interruption to AWS operations in December was caused by the AI agent Kiro autonomously choosing to delete and then recreate a part of its environment, according to reporting by the Financial Times.
The incident affected a cost management resource used by customers to monitor usage costs in one of AWS's 39 regions, reportedly in one of two regions in mainland China.
Reported impact
The outage disrupted the AWS cost management service, preventing customers in the affected region from monitoring their usage costs during the 13-hour period.
AWS provides vital infrastructure for much of the internet, and the outage affected a customer-facing service.
Index analysis
A security researcher, Jamieson O'Reilly, noted that AI-caused mishaps differ from human errors because AI agents typically have less opportunity to self-correct during autonomous actions compared to manual human input, where errors can be caught during typing.
Financial Times reporting cited sources familiar with the matter stating that AWS suffered two interruptions in December due to errors involving its own AI tools, though Amazon disputed this characterization and said there was only one incident affecting customers.
Governance controls
Amazon attributed the outage to user error rather than AI error, stating in a response to the Financial Times that engineers had allowed the Kiro tool to perform certain changes.
Amazon said there was no evidence that AI tools led to more errors than human engineers, characterizing the incident as extremely limited and coincidental in nature.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.