AWS Denies Report That Service Outage Was Caused by AI Coding Tool

An outage of an Amazon Web Services (AWS) service in one of the company’s two regions in China in December was caused by user error, not the company’s Kiro artificial intelligence coding tool, an AWS spokesperson told Reuters in a Thursday (Feb. 19) report.

The outage was caused by “misconfigured access controls, not AI,” the spokesperson said in the report.

The AWS spokesperson was responding to a Financial Times report that said a 13-hour outage was caused by changes carried out by the Kiro AI coding tool.

Seeking Alpha also reported on AWS’ response to the FT article, saying an AWS spokesperson said that the report was not accurate and that the outage was due to user error.

“Kiro puts developers in control—users need to configure which actions Kiro can take, and by default, Kiro requests authorization before taking any action,” the spokesperson said, per the report.

The AWS spokesperson added that the outage affected only the AWS Cost Explorer service and did not impact the company’s hundreds of other services, including compute, storage, database or AI technologies.

PYMNTS reported in June that AI coding assistants are enabling companies to slash technology development expenses while maintaining competitive digital capabilities.

These tools are based on large language models and can generate code, fix bugs and more, enabling smaller teams to do tasks that would otherwise cost a lot more and require additional engineers. They also cut development time for businesses to bring products to market faster.

In August, PYMNTS reported that investors’ concerns that AI tools could enable faster and cheaper software development drove a selloff that impacted the world’s largest software businesses.

One provider of an agentic coding tool, Anthropic, said Feb. 12 that its Claude Code tool was made available to the general public in May and now has run-rate revenue of $2.5 billion.

AWS experienced a separate, broader outage in October that impacted millions of people and large portions of the internet around the world. The company said that outage was the result of issues with the Amazon DynamoDB system, which provides database storage and computing power to websites.

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