Amazon has introduced a temporary 90-day safety reset aimed at tightening how its engineers write, review, and deploy code. The move follows a series of outages that disrupted the company’s e-commerce operations in recent months, some of which were reportedly linked to its own AI coding tools.
According to a report by a media publication citing internal documents, the new measures will apply in addition to existing policies. The policy specifically targets around 335 “Tier-1 systems”—services that directly affect customers—that have experienced multiple order-impacting incidents since last year and are managed by VP-level organizations.
The reset was triggered after what Amazon’s SVP of e-commerce services, Dave Treadwell, described in an internal note to staff as a “trend of incidents.” Some of the failures had a large operational impact.
One such incident occurred on March 2, when customers across Amazon marketplaces were shown incorrect delivery times while adding items to their carts. The issue reportedly resulted in nearly 120,000 lost orders and around 1.6 million website errors. Amazon’s AI coding assistant Q was reportedly identified as one of the key contributors.
Another disruption followed on March 5, when an outage caused a 99% drop in orders across Amazon’s North American marketplaces. The failure reportedly led to about 6.3 million lost orders in a single day. Internal documents suggested the issue stemmed from a production change that was deployed without going through Amazon’s formal documentation and approval process.
As part of the 90-day reset, engineers working on Tier-1 systems must now follow stricter procedures before making production changes. These include getting 2 reviewers to approve code changes, a step that had reportedly been skipped or relaxed in some teams. Engineers are also required to use an internal documentation and approval system called Modeled Change Management for all production updates.
In addition, developers must rely on an automated coding system that strictly follows Amazon’s central reliability engineering standards.
An Amazon spokesperson clarified that the updated policy does not require junior or mid-level engineers to obtain sign-off specifically from senior engineers for AI-assisted code changes.
At the leadership level, directors and VP-level executives responsible for Tier-1 systems have been instructed to conduct a full audit of production code change activities within their teams. This includes reviewing how code has been written, approved, and deployed across their organizations.
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