VIENNA AGENTIC INCIDENTS DATABASE
// public database of incidents involving autonomous AI agents, scored on the VAID scale 0–8

database / VAID-2025-0029

2
INCIDENT
Incident

Reported Kiro involvement in AWS Cost Explorer outage disputed by Amazon

REF VAID-2025-0029 STATUS DISPUTED
no incident type assigned
occurred
2025-12 (day unknown)
reported
2026-02-20
location
AWS China region
domain
infrastructure
agent system
Amazon Kiro, according to the reporting
reporter
VAIDDB editorial
origin
editorial
source
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/amazons-cloud-unit-hit-by-least-two-outages-involving-ai-tools-ft-says-2026-02-20/

== SUMMARY ==

Reporting attributed a 13-hour AWS Cost Explorer disruption to an environment deletion/recreation involving Kiro. Amazon said the cause was misconfigured access controls, not AI, and characterised the impact as limited.

== DESCRIPTION ==

Competing accounts

Reuters relayed Financial Times reporting that Kiro decided to delete and recreate an environment. Amazon's primary response says a misconfigured role caused an interruption to Cost Explorer in one region, with no impact on compute, storage, databases or other services. Amazon also said it received no customer inquiries about the interruption.

Neither account should be silently substituted for the other. The headline must not assert disputed AI causation as settled fact.

Response and limits

Amazon reported additional safeguards, including mandatory peer review for production access, through its Correction of Error process. The exact outage date, internal review opening/closing dates and quantified customer losses are not established by the cited sources.

VAID assessment

Assessment date: 2026-09-09. Consequences-first rubric.

L2 (provisional): The reported 13-hour Cost Explorer interruption supports limited service disruption. This rates the reported consequence conditionally on agent involvement, which Amazon disputes; it does not settle causation. Amazon describes limited impact in one region and no effect on compute, storage, databases or other services. Substantial customer harm is not established, so L2 is the lowest supported level, not an upper bound; a regional billing-tool interruption is not critical regional service disruption warranting L6.

== REFERENCES ==

  1. vendor statement Correcting the Financial Times report about AWS, Kiro, and AI — Amazon, 2026-02-21
  2. news Amazon's cloud unit hit by outages involving AI tools, FT says — Reuters, 2026-02-20

== INVESTIGATION ==

no investigation recorded.

== VAID LEVEL 2: INCIDENT ==

Limited adverse effects on a task, user or service.

  • Small financial loss, erroneous service outputs, bounded unwanted communications or a limited personal reputational attack.
  • Local operational or resource disruption without established substantial outage or severe lasting damage.
  • Recovery, data sensitivity and downstream losses must not be assumed when sources leave them unknown.

> full scale definition