Amazon Implements 90-Day Code Safety Reset after AI-Related Incidents with “High Blast Radius”

Amazon Implements 90-Day Code Safety Reset after AI-Related Incidents with “High Blast Radius”

Amazon has been dealing with outages and customer-impacting incidents where its own artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted coding tools are implicated or under scrutiny.

The company is implementing tighter controls on how it uses generative AI in software development in response, especially in the wake of numerous customer complaints.

Amid a series of outages that disrupted customer orders, Amazon has announced a 90-day “code safety reset” across its critical engineering systems. With the Jeff Bezos-owned company aggressively using AI-assisted coding tools, the reset is intended to stabilise its vast digital operations that have been shaky at best in recent times, with one of the outages related to Amazon’s AI coding assistant Q.

Citing internal documents, a report in Business Insider claims that Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s SVP of e-commerce services, told the staffers that the trend of incidents has emerged since the third quarter of 2025.

“We are implementing temporary safety practices which will introduce controlled friction to changes in the most important parts of the Retail experience,” Treadwell wrote in the document, with the new policy targeting roughly 335 ‘Tier-1 systems’ that can directly impact customers.

While Amazon has allowed engineers to ship a greater amount of code due to AI use, it has led to problems during the traditional software-review processes.

It appears that many customers were unable to access essential Amazon services for a few hours last week.

For roughly six hours on Thursday, website and app users were unable to check out, access account information or view product prices. Amazon said in a statement that the issues were related to a “software code deployment.”

Amazon and its hyperscaler rivals are ramping up spending on infrastructure to manage soaring demand for artificial intelligence services, which require increasing amounts of computing power. In its earnings report last month, Amazon said it expects $200 billion in capital expenditures this year, more than any of its tech peers.

🚨 Do you understand what's happening at Amazon right now?

Their own AI coding agent Kiro reportedly "decided" the fastest way to fix a config error was to delete the entire production environment. Gone. A 6-hour outage. 6.3 million orders lost.

Amazon's SVP called thousands of… https://t.co/1p9QeSm4us

— Tuki (@TukiFromKL) March 12, 2026

In the wake of this event, the company gathered a large group of engineers to review incidents with a “high blast radius“. And the six-hour outage wasn’t the only AI-related problem the company has been dealing with, either.

In a meeting briefing note, the company described the “trend of incidents” as characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes.” As a “contributing factor,” the note listed “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

…In another series of incidents at its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, two separate outages were caused after engineers allowed the company’s in-house AI coding tool to make disastrous changes, additional FT reporting revealed last month. In one case, the AI tool deleted and recreated the entire coding environment.

In response to the earlier reporting, Amazon framed these blunders as an issue related to its protocols around AI usage and “user access control,” rather than an AI autonomy issue, and it appears to be sticking to its guns. The company will not be backing away from deploying AI but is instead insisting on stronger guardrails and more oversight on how it’s used.

Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off any AI-assisted changes, Treadwell said at the meeting, per the FT‘s reporting. Treadwell asked staff to attend the typically-optional meeting.

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… pic.twitter.com/XSXOSqALBN

— Lukasz Olejnik (@lukOlejnik) March 10, 2026

Amazon’s “code safety reset” marks a sobering turn for one of the world’s most technologically sophisticated companies, and is a broader wake-up call for all industries endeavoring to make the most out of AI.

The allure of AI-assisted coding lies in its speed and efficiency, but these same traits can multiply mistakes at scale when not paired with robust human oversight and appreciation for consequences that can be “unintended”.

The recent spate of outages highlights the gap between what generative AI can do and what it should be trusted to do, especially in mission-critical environments… like making sure your customers can find pricing and place orders via your online store.

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