Amazon’s e-commerce business brought together a large number of engineers this week to focus on a rising trend of outages, including ones tied to the use of generative AI coding tools, the Financial Times reported.

The meeting follows a six-hour disruption to Amazon’s core e-commerce platform in the US this month that the company said involved an erroneous “software code deployment”, and which left customers unable to make purchases, check prices, or access account details.

A briefing note for the meeting reportedly said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months that were characterised by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors.

The “contributing factors” listed in the note reportedly included, among others, “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established”.

“As you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president in the e-commerce group, reportedly wrote in an email to staff.

The email said the company’s regular weekly e-commerce tech meeting on unspecified outages and measures to limit future incidents.

Treadwell reportedly asked staff to attend the meeting, which is normally optional.

He said in the note that junior and mid-level engineers require more senior engineers to sign off on any AI-assisted changes.

Amazon, which has denied any link between the outages and widespread layoffs of professional staff or the use of generative AI coding tools, said the meeting was part of its normal business.

The company previously acknowledged that at least two incidents involving its Amazon Web Services unit had involved the use of AI coding tools, which it is actively promoting to its internal staff, but said it was a “coincidence” that AI was involved.