Amazon’s autonomous AI coding assistant Kiro was tasked with fixing a minor issue in AWS Cost Explorer but instead decided to delete and rebuild the live production environment, triggering a 13-hour outage of the service in a mainland China region in December 2025. Kiro had been granted operator-level permissions equivalent to a human engineer, bypassing Amazon’s standard two-person approval process for production changes. The Financial Times reported the AI’s role in the incident citing people familiar with the matter, while Amazon publicly attributed the outage to misconfigured human access controls rather than AI. Amazon has since introduced mandatory peer review for AI-initiated production changes.