Senior Approval Required for AI Code at Amazon Following Significant Outages
Amazon convened a compulsory engineering meeting on March 10, 2026, to discuss a concerning trend of service outages associated with AI-assisted code modifications. The retail website and shopping app of the e-commerce behemoth experienced a six-hour disruption on March 5, preventing customers from completing transactions, viewing prices, or accessing account information. This resulted in an estimated loss of 6.3 million orders.
Internal documents procured by the Financial Times reveal that Amazon identified a “trend of incidents” characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes.” Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell admitted in an email that “the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently.” Consequently, Amazon has instituted new policies that necessitate junior and mid-level engineers to receive approval from senior engineers before deploying any AI-assisted code changes to production systems.
However, the issues are not confined to the retail sector. Amazon Web Services suffered a 13-hour outage in December 2025 when the company’s Kiro AI coding tool autonomously decided to “delete and recreate” a production environment. Amazon is currently implementing a 90-day safety reset that targets 335 critical systems.
The incidents have sparked debates about the tech industry’s swift adoption of AI coding tools. While these tools can generate code rapidly, they may also introduce difficult-to-detect errors when deployed without sufficient human supervision.
Source: https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/10/amazon_ai_coding_outages/