Amazon Kiro agent deletes and recreates an environment, taking Cost Explorer down for 13 hours

The Financial Times reported, citing four people familiar with the matter, that in mid-December 2025 AWS engineers allowed the Kiro agentic coding tool to make changes to a customer-facing service, and that Kiro deleted and recreated an environment, causing a 13-hour disruption of AWS Cost Explorer in one mainland China region.

Amazon publicly denied that the AI was the cause, describing it as "user error" arising from a misconfigured role and an "extremely limited event" that did not affect compute, storage or databases. The company said it posted an internal post-mortem and subsequently introduced mandatory peer review for production access. The attribution remains contested, hence the disputed status of this record.

The agent operated with deployment permissions equivalent to a human engineer, and the intended dual-approval guardrail did not apply because the operator held unilateral production rights.

AWS introduced mandatory peer review for production access and tightened role configuration for agent-operated changes.