According to details given to the Financial Times, Kiro was operating autonomously when it encountered a problem. It decided that its best action was to “remove and recreate” the environment that was causing the problems. According to accounts, this led to an outage that Amazon described as an “extremely limited incident”, ultimately shutting down service in a portion of mainland China.
In specific circumstances, KIRO requires two people to approve its proposed changes before moving forward. But in this case, the AI agent was reportedly working with an engineer who had broader permissions than lower-level employees, and Kiro was being treated as an extension of an operator. As a result, it was given the same permissions as a person and was allowed to push changes without approval, which led to the outage.
Obviously this is not the first time this has happened. Per FT, this is at least the second incident in which Kiro was given extra leeway and ultimately promoted. The previous situation did not affect any “customer-facing AWS services”, so it went unnoticed in the world outside AWS. But employees are taking notice.
Amazon has hit Kiro hard since introducing the coding assistant in July, reportedly guiding employees to use internal tools over external options like OpenAI’s Codex, Anthropic’s Cloud Code, or Cursor — apparently to the displeasure of engineers, who would prefer to use cloud-like tools.
Perhaps it is not surprising then that Amazon is especially protective of her precious baby Kiro. According to the Financial Times, the company described the outage incident as “a user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue” and said it was just a “coincidence that AI tools were involved” because “the same problem could happen with any developer tool or manual action.” The latter part is true; A person could also make the same mistake. However, the point is that they didn’t. It was an AI agent that allegedly had unprecedented levels of access to the company’s code base and caused an uproar.
Amazon has reportedly told employees it wants 80% of its developers to use AI for coding tasks at least once a week. If you find yourself unable to log in to Spotify or Discord, know that Amazon has achieved its goal.
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