• 2 min read
AWS billing bug sent estimates into the billions
An AWS bug briefly showed some customers estimated bills in the millions, billions, and even trillions. Amazon says actual charges were unaffected.
Image: Engadget
Some AWS customers got a nasty shock on Thursday evening when their billing dashboards suddenly showed charges jumping from a few cents to millions, billions, or even trillions of dollars. Amazon says it was a bug, not a real charge increase.
According to posts on forums and social media, affected users saw wildly inflated estimates. One Reddit user said their usage was being billed at $4.2 trillion. In a statement, an AWS spokesperson said:
“The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges.”
The AWS Service Health Dashboard said the issue was caused by incorrect unit pricing in the company’s estimated billing computation system. At the time of publication, Amazon was still working on a fix.
For now, AWS has paused estimated billing updates and is reverting to the most recent accurate billing data, a process it said would take several hours. The company added that customers should watch the dashboard for updates and that “there are no customer actions required at this time.”
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That came too late to prevent some panic. One Reddit user, u/Vatonee, wrote that they “nearly had a heart attack” after seeing two S3 buckets with only a few MBs of data produce a half-billion-dollar forecast. Another, u/lern_by, said they “panicked and destroyed everything on this account” before finding out it was a bug.
Others responded with jokes instead. u/Reese101 quipped that they would set up auto-pay of $0.10 a month, which would clear the balance in about 1.1 billion years.
Enterprise Editor
Marcus follows the money. He covers enterprise software, cloud architecture, and the tectonic shifts in Big Tech strategy. He translates dense earnings calls and complex M&A activity into actionable insights about where the industry is actually heading. If a tech giant makes a silent pivot, Marcus is usually the first to notice.
via Engadget
