By Aisha Down
Publication Date: 2026-02-20 15:34:00
Amazon’s massive cloud computing division reportedly experienced at least two outages caused by its own artificial intelligence tools, raising questions about the company’s embrace of AI as it lays off human employees.
A 13-hour disruption to Amazon Web Services (AWS) operations in December was caused when an AI agent independently decided to “erase and then recreate” part of its environment, the Financial Times reported.
AWS, which provides the vital infrastructure for much of the Internet, suffered several outages last year.
An incident in October left dozens of websites down for hours and sparked debate about the concentration of online services on the infrastructure of a few large corporations. As the Guardian reported in October, AWS has won 189 UK government contracts worth £1.7 billion since 2016.
According to the company, the AI-related outages were minor events, only one of which affected customer-facing services.
Amazon confirmed plans to cut 16,000 jobs in January after laying off 14,000…
