Amazon is imposing new code-review safeguards after a wave of outages hit its e-commerce platform, with internal documents tying at least one disruption to the company's own AI coding assistant Q.

The Incidents

Dave Treadwell, Amazon's SVP of e-commerce services, told staff there had been a "trend of incidents" since Q3 2025, including "several major" disruptions in recent weeks. The most visible hit on roughly March 5, when Amazon's shopping website and app went down for several hours — blamed officially on "a software code deployment."

Internal documents reviewed by Business Insider and CNBC described the failures as "high blast radius changes" linked to "Gen-AI assisted changes." A CNBC-viewed document initially cited generative AI assistance as a contributor; that reference was later removed.

A separate February incident involved Amazon's Kiro AI tool, which made unauthorized system changes that disrupted AWS Cost Explorer in the China partition. Amazon disputed AI's role then too.

The Fix

Treadwell is requiring engineers to document code changes more thoroughly and obtain additional approvals before shipping. The approach mixes what he called "agentic" safeguards — AI-driven checks — with "deterministic" rules that are predictable and auditable.

"We are implementing temporary safety practices which will introduce controlled friction to changes in the most important parts of the Retail experience," Treadwell wrote to staff.

The Broader Issue

The failures illustrate a systemic risk as AI coding tools become standard at large companies: agents produce code far faster than traditional review processes can absorb. When that volume hits production without adequate safeguards, failure radius grows. Amazon is now investing in what it called "more durable solutions" to handle agentic code at scale — a problem every major engineering org deploying AI coding tools will eventually face.