AWS Outage: Human Error, Not AI, Caused Service Disruption, Amazon Confirms

• A December AWS service disruption in mainland China was caused by human configuration errors.
• An internal AI coding agent made system-level changes, but Amazon states the root cause was a permissions mistake by employees.
• The AI tool inherited the access rights of its human operator, bypassing the usual two-human-reviewer approval process.
• Amazon described the outage as an "extremely limited event," emphasizing that misconfigured access controls are the core issue, not AI itself.
• The company has since introduced additional training and safeguards to tighten permission management and oversight of automated systems.