Two Amazon cloud outages in December triggered by AI tools

As major companies around the world start incorporating AI into virtually all aspects of their operation, things are bound to get a little wonky from time to time.

That’s reportedly what happened to Amazon this past December, per the Financial Times. The company’s cloud infrastructure, which makes up the backbone of a large part of the internet as we know it, experienced two minor outages that month, including a 13-hour outage in the middle of the month. It was apparently caused by engineers allowing the agentic Kiro AI system to perform some tasks, which led the AI to “delete and recreate the environment.”

Mind you, this event wasn’t anywhere near the same scale as the big Amazon Web Services outage last October. An AWS spokesperson told Reuters that it was a “brief event” caused by “user error,” not AI by itself. In other words, if the latest report is true, then the company is placing blame on the engineers who let the AI perform tasks rather than the AI itself. At any rate, the spokesperson also said the December outages did not impact major infrastructural services as the big October one did.

While the notion that Amazon’s internal AI can facilitate infrastructure outages is not exactly encouraging, at least it didn’t result in anything catastrophic.

Big, high-profile outages have been a recurring event on the internet lately. Most recently, we saw YouTube suffer a brief global outage. See also: Verizon, Cloudflare, Microsoft 365, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and TikTok.

Experts disagree as to whether internet outages are becoming more common. However, one fact is clear: As websites and apps increasingly rely on a small number of cloud providers — including Amazon Web Services — a single outage can have widespread, cascading effects across the internet.