Elon Musk has addressed reports that Amazon is addressing recent outages, including those related to AI-assisted coding.
The e-commerce giant held a mandatory meeting on Tuesday to “deeply consider” several outages, including some that occurred as a result of the use of AI coding features. financial Times The report cited internal details and emails. According to the outlet, Amazon said there was a “trend of incidents” related to “higher blast radius” and “Zen-AI assisted changes” as well as other variables over the past few months.
Earlier this month, Amazon’s website and shopping app were down for some users, with more than 22,000 users reporting the problem, according to outage tracker DownDetector. Customers were unable to checkout, view item prices, or access their account information. At the time, Amazon said the outage was the result of “software code deployment.”
Reports of the meeting attracted the attention of tech experts, including Musk, who made his comments public while responding to a post by Lukasz Olejnik, a cybersecurity consultant and visiting senior research fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
“Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about the breach of its systems by AI,” Olejnik wrote.
Musk replied, “Proceed with caution.”
Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s senior vice president of e-commerce services, reportedly wrote in an email that the team’s weekly “This Week in Stores Tech” (TWIST) meeting will be used to impose additional guardrails on how AI is used by engineers, including requiring more senior engineers to sign off on AI-assisted changes made by junior and mid-level engineers.
“Guys, as you probably know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Treadwell wrote in an internal email. foot Informed.
Amazon spokesperson said Luck The TWiST meeting is a regular weekly operations meeting with a group of retail technology teams and leaders to review operational performance.
“As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and apps as we focus on continuous improvement,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The company confirmed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was not involved in the incidents. Amazon said only one incident discussed was AI-related, but none involved AI-written code. According to the company, junior and mid-level engineers also do not need senior engineers to sign off on AI-assisted changes.
Risks of rapid AI deployment
The outage and subsequent meeting have raised concerns among cybersecurity experts about the risks associated with the rapid rollout of AI tools. Olejnik pointed out that features like Amazon’s AI assistant Q can speed up the coding process, allowing more code to be produced faster, but it also risks clogging up the systems for writing, testing and deploying that code, making the platform more vulnerable to outages. Luck.
“I’m not making any arguments against the deployment of AI,” he said. “There’s nothing there. It can’t be stopped. Everyone is going to deploy AI. This is an argument against momentum for its own sake or using AI for the sake of using AI.”
Late last year, Amazon began the process of laying off thousands of employees, citing a desire to become more efficient and align the company culturally. The layoffs have continued this year, with the company cutting its workforce by another 16,000 in January. Meanwhile, Amazon continues to pour money into AI and forecasts capital spending of $200 billion in 2026, up from $131 billion in 2025.
On his part, Musk had earlier said that AI would completely bypass coding by the end of 2026.
Olejnik warned that too rapid a shift from human-centric coding to AI-run systems could result in missed security checks, resulting in prolonged downtime or data loss, which could result in business “collapse” due to irresponsible AI deployment.
When asked, he said he has spoken to Musk one-on-one about the need to pay attention to the level of AI deployment in technology.
“I agree with him,” Olejnik said. “AI brings a lot of opportunities, but there is a middle ground between AI going into obsolescence due to not using it and businesses going under due to ill-judged deployment.”
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