AWS AI Tool Triggers 13-Hour Outage in China

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing arm of Amazon, experienced a 13-hour service interruption in mid-December 2025 after engineers permitted the company's AI coding tool, Kiro, to implement changes to an internal system. The outage affected a tool used by customers to analyze service costs and was limited to regions in mainland China, according to company statements and accounts from employees familiar with the incident.

The disruption occurred when Kiro, an autonomous AI agent capable of executing actions based on user instructions, determined that deleting and recreating the environment was the optimal solution to resolve an issue. Engineers had granted the tool access without close oversight, leading to the unintended downtime. Amazon described the event as extremely limited, emphasizing that it did not affect core customer-facing services such as computing, storage, databases, or other AI offerings. A company spokesperson attributed the problem to a user access control error, where an engineer had broader permissions than intended, rather than any flaw in Kiro's design. "This brief event was the result of user error, specifically misconfigured access controls, not AI,"...