Itâs funny when people who probably never used
@kirodotdev start building theories on why Amazon had outage linked to AI-assisted code. If they had they would know you can select your model in kiroâŠ
Amazon had four Sev-1 outages (their highest severity level) in a single week. Internal memos say AI-assisted code changes were a contributing factor.
The timeline here is wild. In October 2025, Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate employees. In January 2026, another 16,000. Thatâs about 30,000 people in five months, roughly 10% of the corporate workforce. CEO Andy Jassy said the cuts were about culture, not AI.
During those same months, Amazon set a target: 80% of developers using AI coding tools at least once a week. They tracked adoption closely and blocked rival tools like OpenAIâs Codex. Even so, 30% of developers still hadnât touched Amazonâs in-house tool Kiro by January.
In December 2025, Kiro caused a 13-hour AWS outage. The AI tool had production-level permissions and decided the best fix for a bug was to delete and recreate an entire live environment. A second incident involved Amazon Q Developer, another AI tool. Amazon blamed both on âuser error, not AI.â But quietly added mandatory peer review for all production access afterward.
Then March 5: Amazonâs retail site went down for about six hours. Over 22,000 users reported checkout failures, missing prices, and app crashes. Amazon called it a âsoftware code deploymentâ error.
Five days later, SVP Dave Treadwell made the normally optional weekly engineering meeting mandatory. His memo acknowledged âGenAI tools supplementing or accelerating production change instructions, leading to unsafe practices.â These problems trace back to Q3 2025. Amazonâs own assessment: their GenAI safeguards âare not yet fully established.â
The new rule: junior and mid-level engineers now need senior sign-off on any AI-assisted production changes. Treadwell also announced âcontrolled frictionâ for the most critical parts of the retail experience.
For context, Googleâs 2025 DORA report found 90% of developers use AI for coding but only 24% trust it âa lot.â An Uplevel study of 800 developers found Copilot users introduced 41% more bugs with no improvement in output. Amazon is finding out what those numbers look like at the scale of a $500 Billion revenue company, with 30,000 fewer people on staff to catch the mistakes.