AWS Billing Glitch Hits Customers With Billion-Dollar Fees
A glitch with Amazon Web Services’ billing operation led some customers to believe they owed the world’s fifth most valuable company billions of dollars. Oops!
A glitch with Amazon Web Services’ billing operation led some customers to believe they owed the world’s fifth most valuable company billions of dollars. Oops! Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, was one of the affected customers. This morning, he woke up to a jarring email alert from AWS: He had racked up more than $1.5 billion in usage fees, and his August 1 bill was on track to be upwards of $3 billion. “I've had this account for 6+ years and in that time my monthly spend has never exceeded $0.02,” Radjewski tells WIRED.
He shared screenshots of his three most recent monthly AWS invoices. They each came out to $0.01. Based on replies to the AWS Support account on X, Radjewski is not alone. Others have received similarly shocking quotes: $22 billion; $75 billion; $110 billion. “Blud why did you hit me with a cost of 5 million USD what did I even do,” one user wrote. “Please explain man my heart will explode.” When reached for comment, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred WIRED to the AWS Service Health Dashboard. While it’s not clear exactly how many customers have been affected, the dashboard characterized the issue as “global.” The dashboard also said that the billing console “began displaying incorrect estimated billing data” on Thursday, July 16 at 10:38 PM ET.
The company began investigating the issue about six hours later, per the dashboard, and concluded that the “root cause” of the error was “an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem.” It did not specify what the issue was. In subsequent updates, AWS said that it’s “rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem,” and said it was attempting to revert to its "last known good estimated bill computation.” It also said it had “paused estimated billing computations." The issue should be resolved by this weekend, and “there are no customer actions required at this time,” the company wrote.
Ultimately, some customers have decided to post through it. One Reddit user posted a screenshot of their current "Cost and usage overview" to the AWS subreddit, which showed that they had incurred $7.1 trillion in service fees since July 1—more than twice Amazon’s market cap.
The BriefWire