AWS AI coding tool decided to 'delete and recreate' a customer system, causing 13-hour outage

AWS suffered at least two outages in recent months after engineers let AI coding tools Kiro and Amazon Q Developer make autonomous changes without oversight. In mid-December, Kiro caused a 13-hour interruption to a customer-facing system by deciding to "delete and recreate the environment." Amazon blames misconfigured access controls, not an AI autonomy issue. But the tools had operator-level permissions with no mandatory peer review. AWS only introduced those safeguards after the incidents occurred.

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