Post ContentLast year, Amazon announced that its cloud computing unit AWS would invest 15.7 billion euros in data centres in Spain’s northeastern Aragon region, which would support the creation of an estimated average of 17,500 jobs per year at local companies through 2033. (Image: Reuters)
Amazon is reportedly looking to strengthen its internal guardrails for coding after its e-commerce operation was hit by a recent spate of outages, with one of the incidents said to be tied to its AI coding assistant Q.
“We are implementing temporary safety practices which will introduce controlled friction to changes in the most important parts of the Retail experience […] In parallel, we will invest in more durable solutions including both deterministic and agentic safeguards,” Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s SVP of e-commerce services, was quoted as saying by Business Insider.
Treadwell was reportedly speaking to staff in an internal meeting held on Tuesday, March 10, to discuss the “trend of incidents” that had emerged since the third quarter of 2025, including “several major” incidents in the last few weeks, as per an internal note ahead of the meeting that was cited by the news report.
As part of the tighter controls, Amazon will reportedly require engineers to document code changes more thoroughly and secure additional approvals. The online retail giant is also expected to implement new safeguards in the code-change review process.
Amazon’s ‘deep dive’ meeting on Tuesday was held after the e-commerce marketplace saw severe disruptions, mainly in the United States, last week. One of the contributing factors of the incidents was “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established,” according to a report by Financial Times.
An Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage which lasted for 13 hours in December, 2025, has also been tied to the company’s AI coding tool called Kiro, the business daily reported based on internal documents.
The problems at Amazon illustrate a growing tension in modern software development, where engineers are facing pressure to generate code using AI tools even as systems to review and validate the vast amounts of AI-generated code have not been put in place properly. This is happening in the backdrop of mass layoffs by big tech companies, who are looking to adopt AI tools and reduce their workforce to save costs.
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In January 2026, Amazon announced it would eliminate over 16,000 corporate roles. While the company has denied that these job cuts have contributed to a rise in service disruption, Amazon engineers have reportedly said that they are dealing with a higher number of ‘Sev2s’ or incidents requiring a rapid response to avoid product outages.
Meanwhile, an Amazon spokesperson has said that Tuesday’s meeting was part of a regular weekly review. “As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and app as we focus on continual improvement,” the spokesperson was quoted as saying. They were further denied that AWS had been involved in any of the recent outages and said that only one of the incidents reviewed was AI-related.
On March 2, 2026, several users reported seeing incorrect delivery times when adding items to their carts on Amazon’s e-commerce website and app. Customers also complained of not being able to complete transactions or accessing functions such as checking account details and product prices.
The nearly six hour-outage led to 120,000 lost orders and roughly 1.6 million website errors. Amazon’s internal review showed that its AI coding tool called ‘Q’ was one of the primary contributors that sparked the disruption, as per reports.
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A few days later on March 5, 2026, Amazon’s marketplace was hit by another outage which led to a 99 per cent drop in orders within the US and resulted in 6.3 million lost orders. A production change deployed without approval was identified as one of the key factors.
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Separately, Amazon’s AWS cloud computing arm reportedly suffered at least two outage incidents linked to the use of AI coding assistants. One of them was a 13-hour disruption that took down a cost calculator used by customers. It was traced back to certain changes made by engineers using Amazon’s in-house Kiro AI coding tool that reportedly opted to “delete and recreate the environment”.
Under the new policy, Amazon engineers are required to get two others to review their work before making any coding changes. They also have to use an internal documenting and approval tool and an automated coding system that strictly adheres to Amazon’s central reliability engineering rules.
Amazon has also reportedly instructed the owners of 335 Tier-1 systems, as well as their director- and VP-level leaders, to audit all production code change activities within their respective organisations. Tier-1 systems provide services that can directly impact consumers.
