According to Financial Times, an urgent meeting has been held as Amazon, who made 30,000 people redundant last year, now face the consequences of using AI for complex coding. The newspaper was sent an internal note, which reveals that all is not well as well as email material, with Dave Treadwell, senior VP being the author of either the note or one of the emails, and asking for senior engineers now have to overlook and approve any code changes that have been made using AI.
Amazon had the meeting to look into why their systems has had crashes, or "outages" as it's called, with senior engineers being called upon to find out why. Generative AI takes some of the blame, and a direct email to staff the company directly admits problems with "availability to the site and related infrastructure". This included 10,000+ customers being unable to checkout from the site, the app not working and outright crashing, and Amazon Web Services have, allegedly, tracked its own 13 hour crash to the use of AI coding, and it was not the only one. According to Financial times, this was in fact due to AI, namely Amazons own Kiro coding bot. Amazon did put out a statement that completely denied this, instead blaming it on simple human error.
Industry analysts have pointed out that the problems arise as AI is no longer just a tool for assisting, but is actively making changes, costing companies like Amazon a lot of very real money, or using a lot of human work time, like the AI system Claude, which on multiple occasions, some of the very recently, have wiped out entire databases in a split second without considering the repercussions.