Amid a series of outages that disrupted customer orders, Amazon has announced a 90-day “code safety reset” across its critical engineering systems. With the Jeff Bezos-owned company aggressively using AI-assisted coding tools, the reset is intended to stabilise its vast digital operations that have been shaky at best in recent times, with one of the outages related to Amazon’s AI coding assistant Q.
Citing internal documents, a report in Business Insider claims that Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s SVP of e-commerce services, told the staffers that the trend of incidents has emerged since the third quarter of 2025.
“We are implementing temporary safety practices which will introduce controlled friction to changes in the most important parts of the Retail experience,” Treadwell wrote in the document, with the new policy targeting roughly 335 ‘Tier-1 systems’ that can directly impact customers.
While Amazon has allowed engineers to ship a greater amount of code due to AI use, it has led to problems during the traditional software-review processes.
Since AI models are not deterministic, meaning they can give slightly different answers to the same question when asked twice, the corporate workflows are upended, where 100 per cent accuracy is expected every time.
“In parallel, we will invest in more durable solutions, including both deterministic and agentic safeguards,” said Treadwell.
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AI But More Predictable
As per Treadwell, the company’s three-month reset will combine AI-driven, “agentic” tools with more predictable, rules-based “deterministic” systems. Critical code changes will now require additional approval and detailed documentation before deployment. Amazon was also tightening reliability testing to ensure stability.
“Amazon engineers must get two people to review their work before making any coding changes. They also have to use an internal documenting and approval tool and an automated coding system that strictly adheres to Amazon’s central reliability engineering rules,” the report highlighted.
Amazon is taking corrective action following a major March 2 disruption that caused incorrect delivery times at checkout. Triggered in part by its AI tool, Q, the incident resulted in approximately 1.6 million errors and 120,000 lost orders across its global marketplaces.
Similarly, another outage on March 5 resulted in 6.3 million lost orders. As per Amazon’s internal documents, a production change deployed without using a formal documentation and approval process resulted in the outage.
