“The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
If you’ve ever gotten an unexpectedly high bill, you know the panic that can quickly set in. Well, imagine that, only for a sum of over a billion dollars. That’s what happened to some Amazon Web Services (AWS) users beginning Thursday evening. Fortunately, it was only a bug, and Amazon is working to fix it.
Forums and social media were full of posts from uneasy AWS customers detailing their sky-high bills, many in the millions or billions of dollars. One Reddit user even claimed their usage was being billed at $4.2 trillion.
An AWS spokesperson wrote that “the displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges.” The AWS Service Health Dashboard states that the problem stemmed from incorrect unit pricing in its estimated billing computation system.
At the time of publication, Amazon was still working on a fix. In the meantime, the company has paused estimated billing updates and is reverting its system to the most recent accurate billing data. It expects the process to take several hours. AWS will continue to update customers via the dashboard. “There are no customer actions required at this time,” it said.
That’s a relief for the affected customers, but not before many dealt with serious anxiety. “I nearly had a heart attack when my two S3 buckets with a few MBs of data generated a half-billion-dollar forecast,” u/Vatonee wrote in the AWS subreddit. Some even took drastic measures before learning it was a bug. “Needless to say, I panicked and destroyed everything on this account,” u/lern_by posted.
Naturally, the internet didn’t pass up the opportunity for a comedy hour. “I think I’ll set up an auto-pay of $0.10 a month to clear it,” u/Reese101 joked, adding that at that rate, they’d pay it off in roughly 1.1 billion years. “Do you think AWS charges late fees?”
