Financial Times says AWS outages tied to internal AI tool decisions
Feb 22nd 2026
FT reports at least two December AWS incidents involved an internal AI assistant and employee actions; Amazon calls the events limited, blames access controls, and says it has added safeguards.
- Financial Times reports at least two December AWS outages were linked to errors involving internal AI tools and employee actions.
- Employees told FT that engineers let an AI agent attempt fixes without intervention, which was foreseeable, according to whistleblowers.
- The AI assistant reportedly chose to delete and recreate a system environment while addressing a Cost Explorer bug.
- Amazon says the incidents were limited in scope, affected one mainland China region, and did not impact customer facing services in the second event.
- Amazon characterizes the root cause as a user access control issue rather than AI autonomy and says mistakes are not more common with AI tools.
- Amazon says it has implemented numerous safeguards after the incidents.