AWS Outage Caused by Amazon AI Tool Kiro - February 2026

Amazon AWS Outage Reportedly Caused by Company Own AI Tool Kiro

A 13-hour Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage in December 2025 was reportedly caused by Amazon's own AI coding tool Kiro, according to reporting by the Financial Times. The incident primarily impacted China and has sparked fresh debate about the risks of deploying autonomous AI agents in production systems.

What Happened

According to four people familiar with the matter, AWS engineers deployed the Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes to the system. The agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, reportedly determined that it needed to "delete and recreate the environment." This led to the lengthy service disruption.

Multiple Amazon employees spoke to Financial Times and noted this was at least the second occasion in recent months in which the company's AI tools were at the center of a service disruption. "The outages were small but entirely foreseeable," said one senior AWS employee.

Amazon's Response

Amazon has pushed back on the characterization that AI caused the outage. The company stated:

"The brief service interruption they reported on was the result of user error—specifically misconfigured access controls—not AI as the story claims."

Amazon said that by default the Kiro tool "requests authorization before taking any action" but that the staffer involved in the December incident had "broader permissions than expected — a user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue."

The company emphasized that the disruption was an extremely limited event affecting only AWS Cost Explorer in one of AWS's 39 Geographic Regions. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of AWS services.

About Kiro

Amazon launched Kiro in July 2025 as an agentic coding tool that can autonomously tweak systems. The company has since pushed employees to use the tool, with leadership setting an 80 percent weekly use goal and closely tracking adoption rates. Amazon also sells access to the agentic tool for a monthly subscription fee.

Broader Context

This incident follows a more serious AWS outage in October 2025, which disrupted services like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite, and Venmo for 15 hours. Amazon blamed that outage on a bug in its automation software.

The December incident adds to ongoing discussions about the risks of giving AI tools increasing autonomy over critical infrastructure, particularly as more companies adopt agentic AI systems that can take independent actions.

Sources: