Elon Musk has commented on reports that Amazon is addressing recent outages—among them an issue tied to AI-assisted coding.
The e-commerce giant held a mandatory meeting on Tuesday to conduct a “deep dive” into multiple outages, including some stemming from the use of AI coding tools, the Financial Times reported—citing internal briefs and emails. Per the outlet, Amazon noted a “trend of incidents” over the past few months with a “high blast radius” linked to “Gen-AI assisted changes” and other factors.
Earlier this month, Amazon’s website and shopping app experienced downtime for some users, with over 22,000 people reporting issues via outage tracker Downdetector. Customers were unable to complete checkouts, view product prices, or access their account details. At the time, Amazon attributed the outage to “a software code deployment.”
The meeting report caught the attention of tech experts, including Musk, who shared his thoughts publicly in response to a post from Lukasz Olejnik—a cybersecurity consultant and visiting senior research fellow at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies.
“Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems,” Olejnik wrote.
“Proceed with caution,” Musk replied.
Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s senior vice president of e-commerce services, reportedly wrote in an email that the team’s weekly “This Week in Stores Tech” (TWiST) meeting would partially focus on implementing additional guardrails for AI use by engineers—including requiring more senior engineers to approve AI-assisted changes made by junior and mid-level engineers.
“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Treadwell wrote in an internal email, the FT reported.
An Amazon spokesperson told that the TWiST meeting is a regular weekly operations gathering involving retail technology teams and leaders to assess operational performance.
“As part of our regular operations, the meeting will include a review of our website and app availability as we work to make ongoing improvements,” the spokesperson stated.
The company confirmed Amazon Web Services (AWS) was not involved in any of the incidents. Amazon stated only one discussed incident was tied to AI, but none involved code written by AI. Additionally, the company noted junior and mid-level engineers are not required to have senior engineers approve their AI-assisted changes.
The risks of rapid AI deployment
The outages and subsequent meeting have raised concerns among cybersecurity experts about the risks linked to the rapid rollout of AI tools. Features like Amazon’s AI assistant Q can accelerate the coding process by generating more code faster, but this may come with the risk of disrupting how code is written, reviewed, and deployed—making platforms more prone to outages, Olejnik told .
“I’m not making an argument against deployment of AI,” he said. “There isn’t any. It can’t be stopped. Everybody is going to deploy AI. It’s an argument against speed for its own sake or using AI for the sake of using AI.”
Late last year, Amazon started laying off thousands of employees, citing goals to boost efficiency and align the company’s culture. These layoffs have continued into this year, with the company cutting an additional 16,000 staff in January. Meanwhile, Amazon has kept investing heavily in AI, projecting $200 billion in capital expenditure (capex) for 2026—up from $131 billion in 2025.
Musk, for his part, has previously stated that AI will completely bypass coding by the end of 2026.
Olejnik warned that transitioning too quickly from human-centered coding to AI-run systems could lead to missed safety checks, resulting in prolonged downtime or data loss that might “blow up” a business due to irresponsible AI deployment.
When asked, Olejnik said he shares Musk’s view on the amount of attention AI deployment in technology should receive.
“I agree with him,” Olejnik said. “AI brings a lot of opportunities, but there’s a middle ground between going to obsolescence due to not using AI, and blowing up businesses due to ill-judged deployments.”