Amazon’s e-commerce group has told its engineers they must all attend a usually optional weekly meeting to discuss recent outages affecting the website and shopping app – including incidents tied to AI coding.

A briefing note ahead of the meeting, due to take place on Tuesday, referred to a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors.

The note, which was shared with the Financial Times, did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss.

However, in an email to staff, also seen by the newspaper, the tech giant acknowledged that "availability to the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently.”

Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees that Amazon would focus its weekly “This Week in Stores Tech” (TWiST) meeting on a “deep dive into some of the issues that got us here as well as some short immediate term initiatives.”

According to the FT, Treadwell added that junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off on any AI-assisted changes.

The meeting follows a major outage last Thursday, with tens of thousands of US users reporting checkout failures, app crashes, and missing orders before services began recovering. The retail giant later attributed the outage to its software code.

Separately, the tech giant’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has suffered at least two outages due to human errors related to the use of its own AI coding tools.

AWS experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, the FT previously reported .

Curious what others think about this story? Contribute your thoughts to the debate below.

Amazon later issued a statement distancing AI use from the mistake and blaming it on human error, saying that the issue stemmed from a misconfigured role, “the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI-powered or not) or manual action.”

According to Mayur Upadhyaya, CEO of APIContext, the recent outages at Amazon are a preview of a broader shift happening across the industry as AI moves from assisting engineers to actively changing systems – meaning that failures can propagate faster and in less predictable ways.

“We've seen from previous major outages, including AWS's own DynamoDB DNS failure back in October, that the blast radius of a control plane or automation error can be enormous and fast-moving," said Upadhyaya.

“What AI introduces is a new vector for those errors to enter systems, one that's harder to audit after the fact because the change logic wasn't written by a human in the traditional sense. A six-hour e-commerce outage at one of the world's largest retailers is a significant real-world cost," he added.

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