Amazon's Kiro agent chose to delete and recreate a production environment, causing a 13-hour AWS Cost Explorer outage; Amazon blames user error

In December 2025, according to the Financial Times (reported by Engadget and The Verge), Amazon's AI coding agent Kiro was working on an issue in an AWS production environment and decided the fix was to delete and recreate that environment. The result was a 13-hour outage of AWS Cost Explorer, the service customers use to review and compare costs, in parts of mainland China. Reports say the agent had the same privileges as production and that engineers let it resolve the issue without intervention.

Amazon disputes the attribution: it says the cause was user error, not AI, and that it has since added safeguards including mandatory peer review and staff training. The Verge covered the dispute under the headline "Amazon blames human employees for an AI coding agent's mistake" (this database previously carried that report as a separate entry, STUPID-2026-0020, now merged here).

Separately, in March 2026 Amazon.com suffered outages that internal documents reportedly tied to a trend of "Gen-AI assisted changes" with a "high blast radius"; one report put the March 5 losses at about 6.3 million orders, and Amazon then required more senior sign-off on AI-assisted changes. Amazon says only one of the incidents it reviewed involved AI-assisted tooling. Those storefront outages are not attributed to Kiro in the reporting and are not part of this record's score.