AWS Billing Glitch Sent Some Users $1.5 Trillion Bills

Amazon Web Services customers were hit with wildly inflated estimated bills after a global glitch produced charges of up to $1.5 trillion for services that normally cost only a few dollars a month.

Dan Harvey, head of marketing at Learning Through Landscapes in Hampshire, told The Guardian he was stunned when AWS emailed him about a bill for a school grounds auditing app that usually costs his charity less than £1 per month. The new estimate was $7.8 billion (£5.8 billion), up from 43 cents the previous month.

“I almost had a heart attack when I got an email from Amazon Web Services notifying me of a bill for an app to audit school grounds, which usually costs our charity less than a pound sterling a month.”

He said he spent time digging through the issue with technical support while panicking over what was happening to the account.

Another user, Bharat, posted a screenshot showing his usage had supposedly risen by 745,728,201,771% from the previous month. He wrote: “I just saw $1.5 trillion on my AWS bill, and my soul left my body.”

Sachin, a student from Delhi, said he normally pays $1.28 per month but was billed $10.9 billion. Andrea Zuvich, who runs the website The Seventeenth Century Lady, said she went through a “terrible half hour of extreme stress” after being told her subscription had been priced at $245 billion — close to Jeff Bezos’s fortune, according to Forbes. She said her usual monthly bill is about $15.

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Another customer said he was horrified to learn he apparently owed the Seattle company $256 billion.

After an hour and a half of investigation, AWS identified what it called a “unit pricing issue in the estimated billing calculation subsystem” and shut down the estimated billing system. In an update, the company said a full fix would take several hours because it needed to recalculate the estimated charge data.