Amazon is making even senior engineers get code signed off following multiple recent outages

• Amazon and AWS have had a few high-profile incidents recently, caused by dodgy code
• Mandatory meeting responded to "Gen-AI assisted changes"
• Senior human oversight now required for code changes

Amazon has reportedly called engineers into a mandatory 'deep dive' meeting to investigate recent outages and reliability issues, and it seems the fix is to humanize AI-generated content.

For example, a six-hour outage on Amazon's main ecommerce site in March 2026 prevented users from being able to complete transactions, view account details and interact with certain product pages – and it was reportedly caused by an erroneous code deployment.

The meeting stemmed from a "trend of incidents" with a "high blast radius," the Financial Times reports, suggesting "Gen-AI assisted changes" have been to blame for a number of recent incidents.

Amazon seemingly worried about some AI code

Amazon SVP Dave Treadwell acknowledged in an email seen by the FT that "the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently."

In order to respond quickly to prevent future near-term incidents, Amazon is reportedly asking that AI-assisted code changes are now approved by senior engineers before they're deployed.

So while Anthropic has launched Code Review for Claude Code to offer some speedy AI assistance to spot any bugs or vulnerabilities, Amazon is clearly emphasizing human expertise.

The latest resolution, which involves senior human sign-off, came as part of Amazon's weekly 'This Week in Stores Tech' (TWiST) meeting, which Amazon says is a regular, optional get-together to "review operational performance across [its] store." This was was reportedly mandatory.

“TWiST is our regular weekly operations meeting with a specific group of retail technology leaders and teams where we review operational performance across our store. 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 TechRadar Pro.

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