AWS billing bug quotes customers billions | $0.19 of usage estimated at $2.5B, rollback didn't fix it
TL;DR
An AWS billing bug showed some customers fake estimates in the billions or trillions; Amazon says charges aren't real, fixed by Saturday.
On Friday morning, some AWS customers opened Amazon's billing portal to find they "owed" Amazon billions of dollars. One customer whose actual usage last month was $0.19 saw an estimate of nearly $2.5 billion.
Amazon confirmed Friday that a bug in the AWS billing portal was showing some customers cloud charges ranging from millions to billions of dollars. A status page update said the problem was in the unit pricing inside its estimated billing computation subsystem, triggered around 3:38 a.m. UK time on July 17. Everyone from solo developers to large customers running AI workloads on AWS got absurd estimates. By Friday morning, Amazon conceded that "rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue."
The examples piled up. One Reddit user said they were billed at $4.2 trillion; a UK charity that normally pays under £1 a month was quoted an estimated £5.8 billion (about $7.8 billion); cryptobriefing reported bills as high as $1.5 trillion. All of it appeared in AWS's Billing and Cost Management Console and Cost Explorer.
The good news for customers told they "owed" billions is that they almost certainly won't be chased for it. Amazon said the estimates "do not reflect actual usage and charges" — the bug only touched the projected numbers shown in the console, not real charges. Amazon later said it had identified the root cause, mitigated the issue, and begun backfilling data in the Cost Management Console, with all customers expected to see corrected amounts by noon Pacific on Saturday, July 18.
$0.19 of usage, a $2.5 billion bill — off by roughly 13 billion times.
via TechCrunch / Engadget / The Register
Amazon confirmed Friday that a bug in the AWS billing portal was showing some customers cloud charges ranging from millions to billions of dollars. A status page update said the problem was in the unit pricing inside its estimated billing computation subsystem, triggered around 3:38 a.m. UK time on July 17. Everyone from solo developers to large customers running AI workloads on AWS got absurd estimates. By Friday morning, Amazon conceded that "rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue."
The examples piled up. One Reddit user said they were billed at $4.2 trillion; a UK charity that normally pays under £1 a month was quoted an estimated £5.8 billion (about $7.8 billion); cryptobriefing reported bills as high as $1.5 trillion. All of it appeared in AWS's Billing and Cost Management Console and Cost Explorer.
The good news for customers told they "owed" billions is that they almost certainly won't be chased for it. Amazon said the estimates "do not reflect actual usage and charges" — the bug only touched the projected numbers shown in the console, not real charges. Amazon later said it had identified the root cause, mitigated the issue, and begun backfilling data in the Cost Management Console, with all customers expected to see corrected amounts by noon Pacific on Saturday, July 18.
$0.19 of usage, a $2.5 billion bill — off by roughly 13 billion times.
via TechCrunch / Engadget / The Register
