Amazon Service Was Taken Down By AI Coding Bot
- Reference: 0180831096
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/20/1252243/amazon-service-was-taken-down-by-ai-coding-bot
- Source link:
> Amazon's cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to [1]errors involving its own AI tools
[2]non-paywalled source
, leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant's push to roll out these coding assistants.>
> Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, according to four people familiar with the matter.
>
> The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to "delete and recreate the environment." Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the "outage" of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the costs of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FT that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group's AI tools had been at the centre of a service disruption.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/00c282de-ed14-4acd-a948-bc8d6bdb339d
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-cloud-unit-hit-by-least-two-outages-involving-ai-tools-ft-says-2026-02-20/
Double standard (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure the AI apologists will soon be flooding the comments with "human coders make mistakes too", but if a human coder decided to "delete and recreate the environment" of a running system they would be fired before the end of the day.
Re: (Score:3)
The problem here is that developers can take responsibility for the action while AI can not. Humans do make mistakes and that's ok; best practice is not to just can employees for messing up. Once is a mistake. Twice is an HR event. When someone does something dumb we forgive but we also insist that meaningful steps are taken to prevent that problem in the future. AI can't really take those steps because AI can't be accountable for "don't do it again." Taking down production because you dropped a table
Lulz (Score:1)
Almost as good as Replit? Or something when it nuked their entire code base.. lmao
vibes (Score:1)
Vibe coding in prod, with a billion dollars on the line. Now THATS some big brass ones.
Turn it off and on again (Score:3)
generally means just one computer, not the whole datacentre!
Obligatory (Score:3)
Ooh, Self-Burn.
Those are rare.
Re: (Score:2)
Not so rare latey - there was also that Crowdstrike thing...
Funny how AI brings computing back to the stage where it was in the 90s - a fun time to be around, with a lot of blue screens of death. Except less fun.
Rights and priveledges (Score:2)
Newly hired employees are not given the same access to important rights and privileges as the CEO.
Did some moron think: AI is just a program written by us, we can give it full access to anything, even running sudo rm -rf /*
They did, didn't they?
No. Bad Software engineer. Bad software engineer.
Your AI bot should not be capable of chmod 777
477 permisions should be the highest any AI should ever have.
Re: (Score:2)
To be fair, it's probably the CEO who asked that the chatbot has 777 access to everything.
Re: (Score:2)
Given the results, 333 should be enough.
AI's biggest weakness is psychopathy (Score:2)
Humans have angst and many might view that as bad, but a healthy fear keeps us out of trouble. AI doesn't have that, no matter how much it tries to simulate that. I code with AI but I would never let it be a sys admin.
Of course this happens! (Score:2)
They are probability based guessing with a lot of additional conditioning(hard coded bias/guidance/etc). Sometimes this will return an acceptable result. Sometimes this will return crazy nonsense, fabrications or harmful information.
Making it dependable "could" be impossible with the LLM approach. At this point, it is Advanced mindless Automation! Not Artificial Intelligence.
Is this the right path to develop to true AI? Maybe, but they are not there yet and might never get there with this approach.
Should have moved it to the cloud (Score:4, Funny)
Have they considered moving Amazon Web Services to the cloud? They should do that.
Re: (Score:2)
> Have they considered moving Amazon Web Services to the cloud? They should do that.
I’m not a computer science major, but my understanding is that would boost vaporware hosting capacity off the charts.