Amazon employees have blamed the AI, Kiro, for deleting and attempting to recreate the environment. Amazon denies this.
If you are a YouTuber, you might have noticed a lot of errors over the last year or so. Statistics failing to update, upload errors, and several other issues seemingly regularly pops up. It never used to be that way since YouTube seemed to run very smoothly on the back end. Then, Google started moving towards AI automation and the errors that were once an extremely rare sighting suddenly became common place.
A lot of people speculated that the AI was to blame, but this was idle speculation. It’s understandable given how much AI has screwed up in other areas. After all, we documented numerous instances of AI causing problems. Those examples include lawyers getting in trouble for fake AI inserted citations in legal briefs, the CNET scandal, the Gannet Scandal, bad “journalism” predictions, fake news stories, more fake stories, Google recommending people eating rocks, the 15% success rate story, bad chess tactics, the Chicago Sun-Times scandal, a Canadian team submitting fake legal citations in their legal briefs, other attorneys submitting fake citation filled legal documents, the 91% failure rate story, AI deleting user data, the lawyer who got fined $10,000 over a bogus AI written legal brief, AI killing workplace productivity with workslop, AI having an 81% failure rate in summarizing news content, AI Overview giving out bad health advice, AI only being able to successfully complete 2.5% of commission work successfully at best, AI slowing software development down by 19%, AI hallucinating in even more court documents, AI being bad at poker, AI slop flooding the scientific community, and AI causing a surge in medical mistakes.
So, you can see why some people have been speculating that AI might be responsible for at least a chunk of the errors and technical warnings YouTubers have seen.
Recently, reports are surfacing that lends more credence to this theory. Last December, Amazon, another company that is going head on into AI in a bid to replace employees, the company was hit with a 13 hour outage of its Amazon Web Services (AWS). It wasn’t all that clear what the cause was, but now we are hearing from internal employees that AI was to blame. From Gizmodo:
When Amazon Web Services got hit by a 13-hour outage in December, it wasn’t because a person tripped over a cord. According to a report from the Financial Times, several anonymous Amazon employees said that the outage was the fault of Kiro, Amazon’s AI coding assistant—though Amazon reportedly blamed human error for the situation.
According to the accounts given to the Financial Times, Kiro was working autonomously when it came across an issue. It decided that its best course of action was to “delete and recreate the environment” that was causing problems. That, according to the accounts, led to the outage that Amazon described as an “extremely limited event,” ultimately knocking out service in one part of mainland China.
Under typical circumstances, Kiro requires two people to approve of 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-ranking 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 the change without approval, which led to the outage.
It also apparently wasn’t the first time that this has happened. Per FT, it is at least the second incident in which Kiro was given additional free rein and ultimately buffed it. The prior situation didn’t affect any “customer-facing AWS service,” so it went unnoticed to the world outside of AWS. But employees seem to be taking notice.
Amazon has pushed Kiro hard since it introduced the coding assistant back in July, reportedly offering guidance to employees that they use the internal tool over outside options like OpenAI’s Codex, Anthropic’s Claude Code, or Cursor—apparently to the chagrin of engineers, who would prefer to use tools like Claude.
It’s not particularly surprising that an AI is screwing things up. Given the absolutely horrendous track record of AI up to this point, it honestly would’ve been surprising if it wasn’t AI that was at fault here.
Now, obviously, Amazon (the company) has a financial motive to try and defend the AI. So, it’s not surprising that they would try and shift the blame to employees because they would rather pretend that their AI is perfect in every way. Still, I have a complete and total lack of surprise that AI was the culprit of the outage. It makes everything make a lot more sense.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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