Amazon is moving to strengthen its internal coding safeguards after a series of service outages were reportedly linked to the use of AI-powered coding assistants. According to reports by a media publication, the company plans to introduce stricter checks and additional approvals for engineers making changes to critical parts of its retail platform. The decision follows several disruptions that affected the company’s online marketplace and internal systems.
“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, said during an internal meeting held on Tuesday, March 10. The discussion focused on a “trend of incidents” observed since Q3 2025, including several major disruptions in recent weeks. Under the new approach, engineers will be required to document code changes in greater detail and obtain extra approvals, while the company also plans to tighten safeguards in the code-review process.
The review came after the e-commerce platform experienced major disruptions last week, mainly in the United States. Reports said one contributing factor was “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.” A separate 13-hour outage in December 2025 affecting Amazon Web Services was also linked to the company’s internal AI coding tool called Kiro. The incidents highlight growing pressure on engineers to produce code using AI tools even as systems for reviewing and validating large volumes of AI-generated code remain limited. The situation has emerged amid layoffs across big tech companies adopting AI to reduce costs. In January 2026, Amazon announced it would eliminate more than 16,000 corporate roles, though the company has denied any connection between the cuts and recent service disruptions.
The most recent incidents included a March 2, 2026 outage where users saw incorrect delivery times while adding items to their carts and faced issues completing transactions or accessing account details and prices. The nearly 6-hour disruption resulted in about 120,000 lost orders and roughly 1.6 million website errors, with Amazon’s AI coding tool Q identified as a primary contributor. Another outage on March 5, 2026 caused a 99% drop in US orders, leading to 6.3 million lost orders after a production change was deployed without approval. Additionally, AWS experienced outages tied to AI coding assistants, including a case where engineers using the Kiro tool reportedly chose to “delete and recreate the environment,” triggering a 13-hour disruption to a cost calculator service. Under the new rules, engineers must obtain reviews from 2 colleagues before deploying code and use internal documentation and approval systems that follow Amazon’s reliability engineering standards. The company has also directed leaders overseeing 335 Tier-1 systems to audit all production code changes, as these systems directly affect consumers.
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