Incident Analysis: 13-Hour AWS Cost Explorer Outage in Mainland China Linked to Kiro AI Tool

December 15, 2025

On a winter day in mid-December 2025, Amazon Web Services (AWS) reported a nearly 13-hour interruption of the Cost Explorer service in one mainland China region. The outage was allegedly due to an internal AI coding tool, Kiro, making changes and deleting/recreating parts of the environment. However, Amazon contested this claim, asserting that the incident was a rare occurrence caused by user error and misconfigured access controls, not AI-related. Through JOIN US, learn more about this case study within the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM database—a crucial resource for understanding and preventing such incidents in the realm of responsible AI development.
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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1442

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

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