AI-Generated Code Causes Outages at Amazon
After a major outage tied to AI-generated changes, Amazon is tightening controls on AI code deployment reported.
Amazon's e-commerce operations experienced a significant outage on March 2, 2026, where customers saw incorrect delivery times, resulting in approximately 120,000 lost orders and 1.6 million website errors. Amazon's internal review pointed to its AI coding tool 'Q' as a primary contributor to the disruption. To prevent future incidents, Amazon is implementing stricter code-change review processes, requiring senior engineers to sign off on AI-assisted code changes made by junior and mid-level engineers. This decision came after a "deep dive" meeting prompted by a "trend of incidents" with a "high blast radius," where "Gen-AI assisted changes" were identified as a contributing factor. Amazon SVP Dave Treadwell acknowledged the recent poor site availability in an internal email. The new measures also include a 90-day "temporary safety reset" for Tier-1 systems, mandating that engineers get two people to review their work and use an internal documentation tool for all production changes. This reset targets approximately 335 systems that have experienced multiple order-impacting incidents since last year. Amazon has invested heavily in Anthropic, but internal guidance limits the use of third-party AI coding tools like Claude Code for production code without formal approval.
