Elon Musk has weighed in on reports that Amazon is addressing recent outage issues, including those related to AI-assisted coding.
The e-commerce giant held a mandatory meeting on Tuesday to “dive into” the multiple outages, including some caused by the use of artificial intelligence coding capabilities. financial times The report cited internal briefings and emails. Amazon said there was a “trend of events” over the past few months that had a “high blast radius” and were related to “Gen-AI-assisted changes,” among other variables, the outlet reported.
Amazon’s website and shopping app were down for some users earlier this month, with more than 22,000 users reporting the issue, according to outage tracking company DownDetector. Customers cannot check out, view item prices, or access their account information. At the time, Amazon said the outage was caused by “software code deployment.”
Reports from the meeting caught the attention of technology experts, including Musk, who made his comments public in a reply to a post from Lukasz Olejnik, a cybersecurity consultant and visiting senior fellow at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.
“Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about artificial intelligence disrupting its systems,” Oleinik wrote.
“Proceed with caution,” Musk replied.
Dave Treadwell, senior vice president of Amazon e-commerce services, reportedly wrote in an email that the team’s weekly “This Week in Store Technology” (TWiST) meetings will be used in part to implement additional safeguards on how engineers use artificial intelligence, including requiring more senior engineers to sign off on AI-assisted changes made by junior and mid-level engineers.
“As you may be aware, the availability of the site and associated infrastructure has been less than optimal recently,” Treadwell wrote in an internal email. financial times reported.
An Amazon spokesperson told wealth TWiST meetings are weekly operational meetings comprised of retail technology teams and leaders to review operational performance.
“As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the usability of our website and apps as we focus on continuous improvement,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The company confirmed that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was not involved in the incidents. Amazon said only one incident was discussed related to artificial intelligence, but no code written by the artificial intelligence was involved. Junior and mid-level engineers also won’t be required to sign off on AI-assisted changes from senior engineers, the company said.
The risks of rapid AI deployment
The outage and subsequent meeting raised concerns among cybersecurity experts about the risks associated with the rapid rollout of artificial intelligence tools. Features like Amazon’s AI Assistant Q can speed up the coding process and produce more code faster, Olejnik said, but it risks breaking the system of how code is written, checked and deployed, making the platform more susceptible to outages. wealth.
“I’m not against the deployment of artificial intelligence,” he said. “No. It can’t be stopped. Everyone will deploy AI. That’s the argument against using AI for the sake of speed itself or for the sake of using AI.”
Late last year, Amazon began laying off thousands of employees, citing a desire to improve efficiency and adjust the company’s culture. Those layoffs have continued into this year, with the company cutting another 16,000 jobs in January. At the same time, Amazon continues to pour money into artificial intelligence, with capital expenditures expected to reach $200 billion in 2026, up from $131 billion in 2025.
Musk has previously said that artificial intelligence will completely bypass coding by the end of 2026.
Olejnik warned that transitioning too quickly from human-centered coding to AI-run systems could result in missing security checks, leading to extended downtime or data loss, which could lead to business “collapse” due to irresponsible AI deployment.
When asked, he said he agreed with Musk on how much attention should be paid to the deployment of artificial intelligence in technology.
“I agree with him,” Olenik said. “AI opens up a lot of opportunities, but there’s a middle ground between being obsolete by not using AI and ruining the business by deploying it wrongly and with poor judgment.”
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
