A glitch and Amazon Web Services’ billing operation led some customers to believe they owed billions of dollars to the world’s fifth most valuable company. Wow!
Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, was one of the customers affected. This morning, he woke up with a shock email address alert from AWS: He had collected more than $1.5 billion in usage fees, and his August 1 bill was about to be more than $3 billion.
“I’ve had this account for 6+ years and in that time my monthly spending has never exceeded $0.02,” Radjewski tells WIRED. He shared screenshots of his three most recent monthly AWS invoices. Each one went for $0.01.
According to responses to the AWS Support account on X, Radjewski is not alone. Others have received similar scary quotes: $22 billion; 75 billion dollars; 110 billion dollars. “Blud why did you hit me at the cost of 5 million dollars what did I do,” one user he wrote. “Please explain man my heart will explode.”
When reached for comment, Amazon spokeswoman Aisha Johnson referred WIRED to AWS Service Health Dashboard. While it’s not clear how many customers are affected, the dashboard characterized the issue as “global.”
The dashboard also said that the billing dashboard “began displaying incorrect bill estimate data” on Thursday, July 16 at 10:38 PM ET.
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 pricing problem within the billing subsystem.” It did not specify what the issue was.
In subsequent updates, AWS said that it was “rolling back recent changes to the billing calculation subsystem,” and said it was trying to revert to its “last calculation of good billing estimates.” It also said it has “suspended estimated bill calculations.”
The issue should be resolved by this weekend, and “no customer action is required at this time,” the company wrote.
Finally, some customers have decided to publish through it.
One Reddit user posted a screenshot of “The current summary of “Costs and usage” for the AWS subreddit, which showed that they had raked in $7.1 trillion in service fees since July 1 – more than double Amazon’s market price.
