AWS Billing Glitch Hits Customers With Billion-Dollar Fees

A glitch with Amazon Web Services’ billing cognition led immoderate customers to judge they owed the world’s 5th astir invaluable institution billions of dollars. Oops!

Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, was 1 of the affected customers. This morning, helium woke up to a jarring email alert from AWS: He had racked up much than $1.5 cardinal successful usage fees, and his August 1 measure was connected way to beryllium upwards of $3 billion.

“I've had this relationship for 6+ years and successful that clip my monthly walk has ne'er exceeded $0.02,” Radjewski tells WIRED. He shared screenshots of his 3 astir caller monthly AWS invoices. They each came retired to $0.01.

Based connected replies to the AWS Support relationship connected X, Radjewski is not alone. Others person received likewise shocking quotes: $22 billion; $75 billion; $110 billion. “Blud wherefore did you deed maine with a outgo of 5 cardinal USD what did I adjacent do,” 1 idiosyncratic wrote. “Please explicate antheral my bosom volition explode.”

When reached for comment, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred WIRED to the AWS Service Health Dashboard. While it’s not wide precisely however galore customers person been affected, the dashboard characterized the contented arsenic “global.”

The dashboard besides said that the billing console “began displaying incorrect estimated billing data” connected Thursday, July 16 astatine 10:38 PM ET.

The institution began investigating the contented astir six hours later, per the dashboard, and concluded that the “root cause” of the mistake was “an contented with portion pricing wrong the estimated billing computation subsystem.” It did not specify what the contented was.

In consequent updates, AWS said that it’s “rolling backmost a caller alteration to the billing computation subsystem,” and said it was attempting to revert to its "last known bully estimated measure computation.” It besides said it had “paused estimated billing computations."

The contented should beryllium resolved by this weekend, and “there are nary lawsuit actions required astatine this time,” the institution wrote.

Ultimately, immoderate customers person decided to station done it.

One Reddit idiosyncratic posted a screenshot of their existent "Cost and usage overview" to the AWS subreddit, which showed that they had incurred $7.1 trillion successful work fees since July 1—more than doubly Amazon’s marketplace cap.