Amazon Disputes Report an AWS Service Was Taken Down By Its AI Coding Bot (aboutamazon.com) 10
Friday Amazon published a blog post "to address the inaccuracies" in a Financial Times report that the company's own AI tool Kiro caused two outages in an AWS service in December.
Amazon writes that the "brief" and "extremely limited" service interruption "was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI as the story claims."
And "The Financial Times' claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false." The disruption was an extremely limited event last December affecting a single service (AWS Cost Explorer — which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our 39 Geographic Regions around the world. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role — the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action.
We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption. We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again — not because the event had a big impact (it didn't), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience. Additional safeguards include mandatory peer review for production access. While operational incidents involving misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool — AI-powered or not — we think it is important to learn from these experiences.
Amazon writes that the "brief" and "extremely limited" service interruption "was the result of user error — specifically misconfigured access controls — not AI as the story claims."
And "The Financial Times' claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false." The disruption was an extremely limited event last December affecting a single service (AWS Cost Explorer — which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our 39 Geographic Regions around the world. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role — the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action.
We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption. We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again — not because the event had a big impact (it didn't), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience. Additional safeguards include mandatory peer review for production access. While operational incidents involving misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool — AI-powered or not — we think it is important to learn from these experiences.
Of course they dispute it (Score:5, Informative)
What else were they supposed to say? Yes, you're right. Now let our stock price tumble?
Re: (Score:2)
TBH though they're right that it isn't AI at fault. AI, in its current form, is not, despite the marketing hype including losers here, autonomous, intelligent, and capable of being handled the burden of responsibility. It is ultimately a tool, and someone chose to use that tool, and someone chose to give that tool the powers it had.
Maybe those are two different someones. Maybe it was an inevitable result of an AI mandate from management, or maybe it was a combination of an AI mandate from management and mis
Of course it is ... (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Of course it is ... (Score:2)
They got a credibility problem there... (Score:2)
Anyways, this "explanation" reeks of misdirection to me.
Re: (Score:2)
"AI-generated blog post explains that AI wasn't involved in AI-caused outage"
Obvioulsy (Score:3)
When AI does something bad it was the fault of the prompter and/or the person that gave it access
According to Amazon (Score:3)
Your honor, my client is innocent. Sure, he set fire to that house and burned it to the ground, but where were the police? They should have stopped him! I say it's their fault the house burned down, prosecute them!
Who remembers? (Score:1)
"We save that for February 29th + 365, or as we call it...*CRASH*"