Amazon has called a large group of engineers to a companywide technical meeting after a series of outages disrupted its e-commerce platform, some of which were linked to the use of artificial intelligence coding tools. The move highlights growing challenges faced by major technology companies as generative AI becomes integrated into software development workflows.
The Seattle-based retail and cloud computing giant said recent disruptions have shown a pattern of incidents with a “high blast radius,” meaning they affected a broad range of systems or users.
Amazon Investigates Recent Service Disruptions
Amazon’s e-commerce division scheduled a meeting Tuesday for engineers to conduct a “deep dive” into the outages and their underlying causes. According to an internal briefing note reviewed by the Financial Times, the company has observed a “trend of incidents” in recent months.
The document cited several contributing factors, including “Gen-AI assisted changes” and “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”
Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s senior vice president overseeing parts of its retail technology organization, acknowledged the reliability issues in a message to employees.
“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Treadwell wrote in an internal email.
Amazon’s main website and shopping app experienced a major disruption earlier this month that lasted nearly six hours. The company said the outage stemmed from an erroneous software deployment, leaving customers unable to complete purchases or access features such as product pricing or account details.
Mandatory Engineering Review Meeting
The company plans to analyze recent incidents during its weekly internal operations meeting known as “This Week in Stores Tech,” or TWiST.
While attendance at the meeting is typically optional, Treadwell asked engineers across the organization to participate. The goal, he said, is to examine the factors that led to the outages and identify immediate steps to prevent similar failures.
As part of the new oversight measures, Amazon is also requiring additional approvals for certain AI-assisted code changes. Junior and mid-level engineers must now obtain sign-off from senior engineers before implementing updates generated with AI tools.
Amazon described the review as part of its normal operational process.
“TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store,” the company said in a statement, adding that the company continuously works to improve site reliability.
AI Coding Tools Under Scrutiny
The outages also underscore broader questions across the technology industry about the risks and benefits of AI-generated code. Tools that assist developers—often referred to as “AI coding assistants”—have become increasingly common at major companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
Amazon has been actively rolling out such tools internally to boost developer productivity.
However, the company’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has already experienced incidents tied to AI-assisted coding.
In December, AWS faced a 13-hour disruption affecting its cost calculator service after engineers allowed Amazon’s internal Kiro AI coding tool to make system changes. The tool reportedly chose to delete and recreate part of the computing environment, triggering the outage.
Amazon previously characterized that event as an “extremely limited” incident affecting only one service in certain regions of mainland China.
A second incident involving AI-generated code did not affect any customer-facing AWS services, according to the company.
Workforce Changes and Operational Pressure
Some Amazon engineers have suggested internally that staffing changes may be adding pressure to engineering teams.
According to earlier reporting by the Financial Times, several engineers said their teams were experiencing a higher number of “Sev2” incidents—technical problems requiring urgent response to prevent outages.
Amazon has implemented multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years as part of broader cost-cutting measures across the tech industry. In January, the company eliminated approximately 16,000 corporate positions.
However, Amazon has disputed the idea that workforce reductions contributed to the recent reliability problems.
A Broader Test for AI in Software Development
The outages come at a time when companies across Silicon Valley are rapidly adopting generative AI tools to speed up software development and automate routine coding tasks.
While these tools promise significant productivity gains, Amazon’s recent incidents illustrate the operational risks that can emerge when AI-generated code interacts with complex production systems.
For Amazon, which handles millions of online transactions each day and operates one of the world’s largest cloud computing infrastructures, maintaining reliability remains critical.
The company’s engineering review is expected to focus on improving safeguards, establishing clearer guidelines for AI-assisted development, and strengthening oversight of code changes that could impact large-scale systems.
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