‘Proceed with caution’: Elon Musk offers warning after Amazon reportedly held mandatory meeting to address ‘high blast radius’ AI-related incident

Elon Musk has weighed in on reports Amazon is addressing recent outages, including one related to AI-assisted coding.

The e-commerce giant held a mandatory meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into multiple outages, including some as a result of the use of AI coding features, the Financial Times reported, citing internal briefs and emails. According to the outlet, Amazon said there was a “trend of incidents” in the past few months with a “high blast radius” and relating to “Gen-AI assisted changes,” as well as other variables.

Earlier this month, Amazon’s website and shopping app were down for some users, with more than 22,000 users reporting an issue, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Customers were unable to check out, view prices for goods, or access their account information. At the time, Amazon said the outage was a result of “a software code deployment.”

The report of the meeting drew the attention of tech experts, including Musk, who made his comments public when he responded to a post from Lukasz Olejnik, a cybersecurity consultant and visiting senior research fellow at Department of War Studies, King’s College London.