Amazon is reportedly holding a meeting with its engineering team for a deep dive into a spate of outages. According to a report in Financial Times, “Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday (March 10) for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools.” The online retail giant reportedly said that there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under “contributing factors” the note reportedly included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”. The report quotes Amazon senior VP David Treadwell, saying, “Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently.” Snippets of the agenda of the reported upcoming meeting are doing rounds on the internet. Tesla CEO Elon Musk too has responded to one such viral post. Quoting a post on the meeting from security analyst Lukasz Olejnik, Musk wrote warningly, “Proceed with caution.” Olejnik’s post shares a screenshot of the FT story about the Amazon engineering team meeting. His post on X, formerly Twitter, has received over 5.5 million views, 7,000 likes and more than 300 comments. Elon Musk’s ‘warning’ post with his comments on the meeting story itself has over 4 million views so far.
What Lukasz Olejnik wrote on Amazon meeting that made Elon Musk reply
As to what Olejnik wrote that made Elon Musk kinda warn is: “Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems. The official framing is “part of normal business.” The briefing note describes a trend of incidents with “high blast radius” caused by “Gen-AI assisted changes” for which “best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.” Translation to human language: we gave AI to engineers and things keep breaking? The response for now? Junior and mid-level engineers can no longer push AI-assisted code without a senior signing off. AWS spent 13 hours recovering after its own AI coding tool, asked to make some changes, decided instead to delete and recreate the environment (the software equivalent of fixing a leaky tap by knocking down the wall). Amazon called that an “extremely limited event” (the affected tool served customers in mainland China).”
Poll
Do you think AI coding tools are causing more problems than they solve in software development?
Amazon website and app outage triggered by software code
Last week, Amazon’s website and shopping app were down for some users. According to a report in CNBC, the outage left Amazon consumers unable to check out, access account information or view product prices. Trouble on the Amazon website spiked around 2 p.m. ET, on March 5, in the US. Over 22,000 users are said to have reported issues two hours later, according to Downdetector website that tracks outage reports.The issues appeared to be largely resolved by 8 p.m. ET. Amazon confirmed the outage and said that the incident was due to “a software code deployment.” “We’re sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping,” Amazon spokesperson Jennie Bryant said in a statement. “We have resolved the issue, which was related to a software code deployment, and website and app are now running smoothly.”
