Amazon plans ‘deep dive’ internal meeting address AI-related outages

Amazon CNBC confirmed at a retail tech meeting on Tuesday that it plans to address a number of recent outages, including those tied to AI-powered coding errors.

Dave Treadwell, a senior executive who oversees the technical underpinnings of Amazon’s website, told employees that the company’s “Tech This Week in Stores,” or TWiST, meeting would be a “deep dive” into “some of the issues that got us here.” The meeting is scheduled to begin at 12:30 pm ET.

“Folks, as you probably know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been great lately,” Treadwell, senior vice president at the E-Commerce Foundation, wrote in a memo to employees viewed by CNBC. He added that he changed the focus of the meeting “given the incidence of Sev 1s,” referring to high-severity events that cause outages or degraded performance of critical systems.

Treadwell said Amazon had experienced four such incidents in one week and noted that a deeper dive was necessary to “regain our strong availability posture.”

Financial Times he was the first to report the grades. TWiST is a regular weekly meeting where retail technology leaders review the performance of store operations, an Amazon spokesperson said.

“As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the usability of our website and app as we focus on continuous improvement,” the spokesperson said in a statement. he said.

The meeting comes after Amazon’s online store crashed for some users last week. For nearly six hours on Thursday, website and app users were unable to make payments, access account information or view product prices. Amazon said in a statement that the problems were related to “software code distribution.”

Amazon and its hyperscaler rivals are increasing infrastructure spending to manage growing demand for AI services that require increasing amounts of computing power. Amazon said in its earnings report last month that it expects $200 billion in capital spending this year, more than any other technology peer.

While it increases spending on artificial intelligence, Amazon also continues to cut jobs. The company laid off nearly 16,000 company employees in January, following mass layoffs in October that saw nearly 14,000 positions eliminated. Amazon also laid off more than 27,000 employees between 2022 and 2023.

In a separate memo to employees, Treadwell wrote that “genAI-enabled changes” were one of the contributing factors to recent events dating back to the third quarter of 2025.

It noted “GenAI tools that supplement or expedite production change orders, leading to unsafe practices,” among other factors, according to the memo viewed by CNBC. Treadwell also acknowledged that “best practices and precautions” for using productive AI have not yet been fully established.

According to the statement, Amazon plans to “strengthen” various safeguards to prevent further problems, including requiring more senior engineers to review “GenAI-powered” production changes made by lower-level staff.

“We are implementing temporary security practices that will bring controlled friction to changes in the most important parts of the retail experience, while in parallel we will invest in more resilient solutions, including both deterministic and agency protections,” Treadwell wrote.

Amazon Web Services has also faced multiple outages in recent months, but the company said Tuesday that its cloud group was not involved in the incidents Treadwell mentioned.

According to various reports, AWS was affected by an incident in December that disabled its cost management feature for an extended period of time. The FT reported that the problem arose after engineers allowed the Kiro AI coding tool to make changes.

Amazon he said in a statement At the time, the outage was due to “user error” and not AI.

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