Four high-severity incidents hit its retail website in a single week, including a six-hour meltdown last Thursday that locked shoppers out of checkout, account information and product pricing. The meeting, run by the senior vice president who oversees Amazon’s ecommerce infrastructure, was framed as a “deep dive” into what went wrong. What went wrong, it turns out, involves the very AI tools Amazon has been pushing its own engineers to adopt, according to the FT.
An internal document prepared for the meeting initially identified “GenAI-assisted changes” as a factor in a pattern of incidents stretching back to Q3. That reference was deleted before the meeting took place, according to the Financial Times, which viewed both versions of the document.
“As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and app as we focus on continual improvement,” an Amazon spokesperson told Fortune.
The internal documents, obtained and reported by CNBC, tell another story. Dave Treadwell, SVP of eCommerce Foundation, laid it out for staff:. Site availability had not been good recently, he wrote, and the string of Sev 1s—the most severe classification for incidents that take down important systems—demanded immediate attention.
But the internal documents, as initially written, according to CNBC, tell a more complicated story. Treadwell acknowledged in his note that “best practices and safeguards” around generative AI usage haven’t been fully established, and wrote that the company would introduce “controlled friction” into deployments involving the most critical parts of the retail experience, according to CNBC. Either way Amazon calls it, the message to engineers was that AI-assisted changes now get more scrutiny.
But a separate Amazon memo announcing the same layoffs cited the need to adapt to “transformative technology,” the kind of language that maps a lot more cleanly onto an AI-driven workforce reduction than a spring cleaning. But it seems that either way, Amazon has found itself in need of more humans in the process.
