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Tag: KIRO

  • 13-hour AWS outage reportedly caused by Amazon’s own AI tools

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    A recent Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage that lasted 13 hours was reportedly caused by one of its own AI tools, according to reporting by Financial Times. This happened in December after engineers deployed the Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes, say four people familiar with the matter.

    Kiro is an agentic tool, meaning it can take autonomous actions on behalf of users. In this case, the bot reportedly determined that it needed to “delete and recreate the environment.” This is what allegedly led to the lengthy outage that primarily impacted China.

    Amazon says it was merely a “coincidence that AI tools were involved” and that “the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action.” The company blamed the outage on “user error, not AI error.” It said that by default the Kiro tool “requests authorization before taking any action” but that the staffer involved in the December incident had “broader permissions than expected — a user access control issue, not an AI autonomy issue.”

    Multiple Amazon employees spoke to Financial Times and noted that this was “at least” the second occasion in recent months in which the company’s AI tools were at the center of a service disruption. “The outages were small but entirely foreseeable,” said one senior AWS employee.

    The company launched Kiro in July and has since pushed employees into using the tool. Leadership set an 80 percent weekly use goal and has been closely tracking adoption rates. Amazon also sells access to the agentic tool for a monthly subscription fee.

    These recent outages follow a more serious event from October, in which a 15-hour AWS outage disrupted services like Alexa, Snapchat, Fortnite and Venmo, among others. The company blamed a bug in its automation software for that one.

    However, Amazon disagrees with the characterization of certain products and services being unavailable as an outage. In response to the Financial Times report, the company shared the following , which it also published on its news blog:

    We want to address the inaccuracies in the yesterday. The brief service interruption they reported on was the result of user error—specifically misconfigured access controls—not AI as the story claims.

    The disruption was an extremely limited event last December affecting a single service (AWS Cost Explorer—which helps customers visualize, understand, and manage AWS costs and usage over time) in one of our 39 Geographic Regions around the world. It did not impact compute, storage, database, AI technologies, or any other of the hundreds of services that we run. The issue stemmed from a misconfigured role—the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI powered or not) or manual action. We did not receive any customer inquiries regarding the interruption. We implemented numerous safeguards to prevent this from happening again—not because the event had a big impact (it didn’t), but because we insist on learning from our operational experience to improve our security and resilience. Additional safeguards include mandatory peer review for production access. While operational incidents involving misconfigured access controls can occur with any developer tool—AI-powered or not—we think it is important to learn from these experiences. The Financial Times’ claim that a second event impacted AWS is entirely false.

    For more than two decades, Amazon has achieved high operational excellence with our Correction of Error (COE) process. We review these together so that we can learn from any incident, irrespective of customer impact, to address issues before their potential impact grows larger.

    Update, February 21 2026, 11:58AM ET: This story has been updated to include Amazon’s full statement in response to the Financial Times report.

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    Lawrence Bonk

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  • Healthier Together: Finding support as a kinship caregiver

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    Healthier Together: Finding support as a kinship caregiver

    If you’re a grandparent or older person who’s had to take over caring for a younger family member, you’ve probably realized there’s not a lot of support out there.

    Some groups are trying to change that. KIRO 7’s Ranji Sinha shows us one of them in this week’s Healthier Together.

    Kiana Davis lives in the Seattle area and identifies herself as a kinship caregiver.

    “I’ve been a mama auntie for close to 10 years,” she tells KIRO 7.

    Reshell Wilson is also a kinship caregiver, a grandmother who took on parenting duties.

    “So about 13 years ago, my stepdaughter had an issue with drugs and alcohol and schizophrenia, and the state took the kids, and they were wards of the state for a while, and my husband and I didn’t want the kids and the system, and so we decided to go to court and get third-party custody of them,” she tells KIRO 7.

    Neither Davis nor Wilson is the parent of the children they’re raising. They’re part of a growing group of older adults often tasked with taking care of young children.

    Both women also know that getting access to resources is hard as a non-parent raising children. Cambia Health Foundation is trying to change that.

    The foundation announced $280,000 in grants to support older adult caregivers.

    According to Cambia nationwide, there are more than 2.4 million children living in grand families, and 60% live with actual grandparents.

    Wilson, Davis, and many others know that these families often don’t qualify for foster care assistance. Foster care assistance is often geared more towards parents.

    Catholic Community Services of Western Washington helps by providing support to kinship caregiver families, and will get some of the Cambia grant money.

    Wilson didn’t want her grandchildren to be wards of the state and got custody.

    She knew raising them would not be easy, and was recently featured in a magazine as an unsung hero for taking on the task as parents again.

    “We had a fear that if we let the state take them, they would be in and out of different homes, being around people that they don’t know, and it was easier because we were the grandparents for us to just take them,” she says. “The hardest part about that was, as it was said earlier, is just money, being able to have the resources to take care of them.”

    Davis took over from her sister, who was in another state and had drug problems. CPS called and told her family they had 24 to 48 hours to find someone to take the children.

    “So my story started in 2015, October. My sister was married at the time, living in Texas and she was having some problems with her husband, and I think drugs,” she told KIRO 7. “So every one of my family, my sister, my mom, were all like, who was going to get them? And I said, I will go.”

    Davis said she got on a plane and got the children.

    “My sister paid for a night in the hotel, so we stayed that night in the hotel. They didn’t know me, I had never really seen them. My niece at the time, my niece daughter was four years old, and my nephew son was seven, So they just went with me.” Davis said the children did not cry, but caring for them this past decade has been hard as an older aunt,“ she told KIRO 7.

    These women were helped by Catholic Community Services of Western Washington when basic assistance wasn’t enough. Barb Taylor helps coordinate the program that helps kinship caregivers and says the program helps with everything from school supplies to clothes, even summer programs. It’s been 12 years that CCSWW has had a kinship program The hope is that there will be many more.

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  • Students in Seattle Public Schools head back to class with new safety upgrades

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    Students in Seattle Public Schools head back to class with new safety upgrades

    As thousands of Seattle Public Schools students head back to class, some of them will be returning to schools with new safety upgrades.

    Those upgrades include secure entry points with required sign-in, improved cameras, and a comprehensive security and communications systems are especially important in case of a lockdown.

    One of the schools with the changes is Rainier Beach High School, which will be open for its first full year of classes this fall.

    “Do you feel safe going back to school?” reporter Linzi Sheldon asked student Astou Sarr, who will be a senior this year.

    “I feel relatively safe, especially because our building has more extensive measures to improve safety,” Sarr said.

    Parent Toni Babbs has two boys going to the new high school this year.

    “I think we all know a lot of school shootings have happened over the years,” she said. “That’s really one of my greatest fears with my kids being in school.”

    When KIRO 7 visited in August, some construction was still underway outside.

    But inside, a new security system is ready.

    Wells showed the KIRO 7 crew the large ‘Lockdown’ and ‘Shelter in Place’ buttons in the office.

    “Staff is able to jump up push that button and put this entire school into a lockdown or shelter in place,” he said.

    He pointed out the new, upgraded intercoms. Essential messages scroll across the bottom and on screens in the halls.

    If the school goes into a lockdown, the main office can see all classrooms on a map and pinpoint which ones haven’t acknowledged the alert.

    “We can chime into that room via the intercom system and ask, ‘Are you guys OK?’ We can listen in, see if there are any concerns,” Wells said.

    “You can actually listen in to the classroom?” Sheldon asked.

    “Only if you’re in the lockdown situation,” Wells said.

    Babbs said that makes sense.

    “What if someone is being kept from having to call for help or say that something’s wrong?” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being able to listen in.”

    The new security system also helps the central office react quickly when a school goes into a lockdown. Staff can put neighboring schools into a shelter in place with the click of a button.

    Wells says 15 schools will have the new security system in place by the end of the year.

    Rainier Beach is one of nine schools with the system up and running as the school year begins.

    So how do you decide which schools get the upgrades first?

    “Are you targeting schools that have the most need?” KIRO 7 reporter Linzi Sheldon asked.

    “Correct, or the most outdated equipment as far as in the classrooms,” Wells said. “Also, some of the security reports that we receive, the criminal activity around our schools that we can focus on trying to get those.”

    The upgrades are funded with $57.2 million from the BEX VI levy that voters passed this February. Wells said the hope to get all these security upgrades across all the district’s schools by the end of 2028.

    “So, you’re looking at four phases,” he said. “I think we’re saying we have phase one now. The second phase will start in 2026 and we’re looking at hopefully 30 schools.”

    Another change is an alert button in each classroom and other areas of the school. SPS did not show it to KIRO 7, citing safety reasons, but said it’s a big upgrade from teachers having to call the main office.

    Wells said the notification goes to the main office, security team, and administrative team, who can then decide to put the school in a shelter in place or lockdown if needed.

    Sarr called it a good idea.

    “Fights would go on longer than they actually needed to be,” she said. “Now that you have that emergency button and stuff, it’s quick.”

    There are sensors on all exterior doors that will alert the office if the doors have been propped open or left ajar and about 160 upgraded cameras across the new campus.

    “People need to take notes, make sure they’re not doing anything they’re not supposed to be doing because the camera’s going to get them real quick!” Sarr said.

    Not part of the levy, but it’s rolling out at several schools, including Rainier Beach is a secure entry point.

    Staff must first let a person in the doors, then buzz them out of a vestibule so they can enter the office.

    There, staff can ask for an ID and the person signs in using a cell phone number or an email address. The kiosk then prints a pass.

    Also new this year, SPS is introducing an app district-wide called SaferWatch.

    It has an anonymous tipline that kids can use by reporting suspicious activity via the app, text, a phone call, or a web form. The tipline is funded by a grant from Stand with Parkland, an organization started after the mass school shooting at the Parkland school in Florida in 2018.

    “I think that could be beneficial to a certain extent,” Sarr said, adding that she still worries people’s personal information could fall into the wrong hands.

    “A con… like I feel it would just need to be more transparent, so people know how they’re handling like the tips and stuff,” she said.

    Babbs has similar concerns but sees nothing wrong with another tool.

    “Even if we get five students that are going to use the app to report something, that’s better than zero,” she said.

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