You know the shock that you see when a bill is higher than you thought? Well, some Amazon Web Services (AWS) users just got the bill shock of their lives.
Some AWS users were surprised when they learned their forecasted monthly expenses would be in the billions, with some even hitting the trillion-dollar mark.
Bill Radjewski, the owner-operator of CollegeFootballData.com, posted to X that he woke up to an email from AWS that he had racked up more than US$1.5 billion (approx. C$2.1 billion) in usage fees, and told Wired that his August 1 bill was on pace to cost him more than US$3 billion (approx. C$4.2 billion).
Radjewski also noted to Wired in an email that over the six-plus years he has had the account, his monthly spending was never more than a couple of cents.
And there are other examples, like India-based AI Engineer Bharath, who noted on X “my soul left my body” after seeing a US$1.5 trillion (approx C$2.1 trillion) bill on their AWS account.
Now, the good news is that this was a glitch, and no one is actually racking up a trillion-dollar AWS bill overnight. Most of the people publicly sharing their AWS bills haven’t spent more than a dollar per month on the service.
AWS’ support team wrote on social media that “We are investigating issues with Cost Explorer reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data,” noting in a reply that “There are no customer actions required at this time.”
Moreover, it looks like the issue might already be fixed. AWS noted on the service health dashboard that a faulty configuration change within the billing system was implemented on July 16. The company noted “this system relies on unit conversion data to calculate line item charges,” and that the change “caused updates to the unit conversion data to fail,” which led to the outrageous costs.
Several logs on the health dashboard showed that AWS tried multiple fixes across two days before finally marking the issue as fully resolved.
