Amazon Web Services faced two service outages in December after engineers used an internal coding tool, according to a report by the Financial Times.
The newspaper said the incidents resulted from errors involving Amazon’s own tool, known as Kiro. In one case in mid-December, AWS customers experienced a 13-hour interruption.
Engineers had allowed the tool to carry out certain system changes. It then decided to “delete and recreate the environment”, the report said, which led to the disruption.
AWS disputed that account.
In an emailed response to Reuters, a company spokesperson said the disruption was brief and blamed it on user error. “This brief event was the result of user error-specifically misconfigured access controls, not AI.”
The spokesperson added that the interruption was “an extremely limited event” affecting a single service in one of AWS’s two mainland China regions. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other AWS services, the company said.
The December incidents follow an outage in October that disrupted Amazon’s cloud operations globally. That earlier failure affected Amazon’s own services and several high-profile apps, including Reddit, Roblox and Snapchat.
AWS is the cloud division of Amazon and supports a large share of the internet’s infrastructure. Because of that reach, even short interruptions can affect millions of users and businesses.
Both Amazon Web Services outages in December have drawn attention because they involved automation tools that can act with limited human input.
Cloud providers have been expanding the use of such systems to manage complex infrastructure. At the same time, customers expect stability and clear accountability when problems occur.
Competitors including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are also developing automated tools to manage their platforms.
AWS maintains that the December disruption resulted from misconfigured access controls, not from the coding tool acting on its own.
