Elon Musk's warning as Amazon probes AI-linked outages: ‘Proceed with caution’

“Proceed with caution,” is how Elon Musk responded as reports surfaced about Amazon investigating outages possibly linked to AI-assisted coding. Elon Musk’s brief comment-cum-warning came after the company reportedly convened a mandatory internal meeting to review recent outages in the services.

The meeting was also convened to assess whether generative AI-driven code changes played a role in the disruptions.

Elon Musk's comment came after a post from cybersecurity consultant Lukasz Olejnik. The cybersecurity consultant had said, “Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems."

In an internal communication, cited by Financial Times, Amazon cited “trend of incidents” over recent months, many with a “high blast radius,” attributed partly to “Gen-AI assisted changes” along with other factors.

Earlier during such an outage, Amazon said that it had resolved an issue related to its software code that had caused an hours-long outage on its website for thousands of shoppers.

According to the reports, the Amazon disruption started around 12:30 am IST. It gradually eased to less than 650 incidents of people reporting issues with the website in the United States, down from a peak of about 22,000, according to outage-tracking website Downdetector.com.

As the outage began, Amazon users took to the social media, citing checkout failures, fluctuating prices, app crashes, and inability to access order histories or product pages.

Downdetector also mentioned minor disruptions in the services of Prime Video and Amazon's cloud unit Amazon Web Services (AWS).

After the outage was resolved, an Amazon spokesperson said, “We're sorry that some customers may have temporarily experienced issues while shopping. We have resolved the issue, which was related to a software code deployment, and (the) website and app are now running smoothly.”

The incident comes less than six months after the Seattle-based company's major outage in October 2025, an incident that caused global turmoil and knocked thousands of apps, payment systems and workplaces offline for hours.

Separately, some of Amazon's data centers in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were damaged by drone strikes linked to the Middle East conflict earlier this week, disrupting its cloud services.

“In the UAE, two of our facilities were directly struck, while in Bahrain, a drone strike in close proximity to one of our facilities caused physical impact to our infrastructure,” AWS said.

It further said, “These strikes have caused structural damage, disrupted power delivery to our infrastructure, and in some cases required fire suppression activities that resulted in additional water damage.”

“We are working to restore full service availability as quickly as possible, though we expect recovery to be prolonged given the nature of the physical damage involved.”

(With Reuters inputs)