AI Coding Mishap Brings Down Major AWS Service in China

The 13-hour outage occurred as a result of Amazon’s AI coding assistant Kiro, which incorrectly deleted and recreated the environment it was working on, causing widespread disruption to an AWS service used by parts of mainland China. According to reports, multiple employees have confirmed that Kiro had been granted elevated permissions due to a human error, allowing the bot to push changes without proper oversight. This unauthorized access led to the system failure, which ultimately resulted in the outage. The incident highlights concerns about the reliability and safety of AI systems, particularly when they are granted excessive privileges or autonomy.