“Billing estimates shown do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
If you’ve ever received a surprisingly high bill, you know the panic that can quickly set in. Well, imagine that, only for a sum of over a billion dollars. This is what happened to some Amazon Web Services (AWS) users on Thursday evening. Fortunately, this was just a bug and Amazon is working to fix it.
Forums and social media were full of messages from worried AWS customers detailing their exorbitant bills, often in the millions or billions of dollars. One Reddit user even claimed that it costs $4.2 trillion to use.
An AWS spokesperson wrote that “billing estimates shown do not reflect actual usage and charges.” The AWS Service Health dashboard indicates that the issue was caused by incorrect unit pricing in its estimated billing calculation 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. He expects the process to take several hours. AWS will continue to update customers through the dashboard. “No customer action is required at this time,” it said.
This is a relief for affected customers, but not before many of them face serious anxiety. “I almost had a heart attack when my two S3 buckets with a few MB of data generated a forecast of half a billion dollars,” u/Vatonee wrote in the AWS subreddit. Some even took drastic measures before learning it was a bug. “Needless to say, I freaked out and destroyed everything on this account,” u/lern_by posted.
Naturally, the Internet didn’t pass up the opportunity for an hour of comedy. “I think I’ll set up an automatic payment of $0.10 per month to pay that off,” u/Reese101 joked, adding that at this rate, they’ll pay it off in about 1.1 billion years. “Do you think AWS charges late fees? »
