A failure with Amazon Web Services’ billing operation led some customers to believe they owed 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, you woke up to an alarming email alert from AWS: You had racked up more than
A failure with Amazon Web Services’ billing operation led some customers to believe they owed 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, you woke up to an alarming email alert from AWS: You had racked up more than $1.5 billion in usage fees, and your August 1 bill was on track to surpass $3 billion.
“I’ve had this account for over 6 years and in that time my monthly spending has never exceeded $0.02,” Radjewski tells WIRED in an email. He shared screenshots of his three most recent monthly AWS bills. Each of them came out to $0.01.
According to responses to the AWS Support account on X, Radjewski is not alone. Others have received equally impressive quotes: $22 billion; 75 billion dollars; 110 billion dollars. “Blud, why did you impose a cost of 5 million dollars on me? What did I do?” wrote one user. “Please explain to me man, my heart will explode.”
When reached for comment, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred WIRED to the AWS Service Health Dashboard. While it’s unclear exactly how many customers have been affected, the panel 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 p.m.EDT.
The company began investigating the issue about six hours later, according to the panel, and concluded that the “root cause” of the error was “an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing calculation subsystem.” He did not specify what the problem was.
In subsequent updates, AWS said it was “reverting a recent change to the billing calculation subsystem” and was attempting to revert to its “last known good estimated bill calculation.” It also said it had “paused estimated billing calculations.”
The issue should be resolved this weekend and “no customer action is required at this time,” the company wrote.
In the end, some clients have decided to publish through it.
A Reddit user posted a screenshot of their current “cost and usage summary” on the AWS subreddit, which showed that they had incurred $7.1 trillion in service fees since July 1, more than double Amazon’s market cap.
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