A problem with Amazon Web Services’ billing operation has led some customers to believe they owe billions of dollars to the world’s fifth most valuable company. Oops !
Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, was one of the affected customers. This morning he woke up to a shock e-mail AWS alert: It had racked up more than $1.5 billion in user fees, and its August 1 bill was on track to exceed $3 billion.
“I have had this account for over 6 years and during that time my monthly spending has never exceeded $0.02,” Radjewski told WIRED in an email. He shared screenshots of his three most recent monthly AWS bills. They each came out at $0.01.
Based on responses to the AWS Support account on X, Radjewski is not alone. Others received equally shocking quotes: 22 billion dollars; 75 billion dollars; 110 billion dollars. “Blud, why did you hit me for a cost of 5 million dollars, what did I do”, a user wrote. “Please explain to me, man, my heart is going to explode.”
When reached for comment, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred WIRED to AWS Service Health Dashboard. While it’s unclear how many customers were affected, the dashboard described the issue as “global.”
The dashboard also states that the billing console “started displaying incorrect estimated billing data” on Thursday, July 16 at 10:38 p.m. EDT.
The company began investigating the issue about six hours later, according to the dashboard, and concluded that the “root cause” of the error was “a unit price issue in the estimated billing calculation subsystem.” He did not specify what the problem was.
In subsequent updates, AWS said it was “rolling back a recent change to the billing calculation subsystem” and attempting to return to its “last known correct estimated bill calculation.” It also said it had “suspended estimated billing calculations.”
The issue is expected to be resolved by this weekend and “no customer action is required at this time,” the company wrote.
Eventually, some customers decided to post via this site.
A Reddit user posted a screenshot from 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.