AWS Glitch Showed Trillion-Dollar Bills to Customers

Amazon Web Services customers around the world briefly saw something close to a worst-case scenario: account charges inflated into the billions and even trillions of dollars.

One user in India, Bharath, posted on X that he saw an AWS bill showing $1,499,659,180,107. The billing page said his total had jumped 744,728,201,771% month over month. Bharath summed it up simply:

“my soul left my body”

According to The Guardian, Dan Harvey, a marketer working for an educational nonprofit in the U.K., said he “almost had a heart attack” after his bill appeared to jump from 43 cents last month to $7.8 billion this month, even before the month had ended. Harvey told the paper he had to call tech support and “have a real dig around” to figure out what was happening.

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Amazon later said the issue has been resolved. In a statement, the company said that on July 16 and 17, customers received erroneous budget and cost anomaly detection alerts and saw inflated estimated cost and usage data in the Billing and Cost Management Console and the Cost and Usage Reports.

The company said the amounts were inaccurate and did not affect customer invoices.

An update posted Saturday on the AWS service health dashboard explained the cause: a faulty configuration change introduced on July 16 in the AWS billing system. AWS said the system depends on unit conversion data to calculate line-item charges, but the change caused updates to that data to fail. That in turn inflated line-item costs in the billing console and triggered the false budget and anomaly alerts.

Dashboard logs show AWS working on a fix for roughly two days before marking the incident fully resolved.