AWS Billing Bug Sends Estimates to $2.5 Trillion

AWS temporarily froze estimated billing updates on Friday, July 17, after a pricing bug caused the Billing Console and Cost Explorer to display wildly inflated figures. Some customers received overage alerts for hundreds of millions or even trillions of dollars.

The AWS Health Dashboard said Cost Explorer was “reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data.” AWS identified the root cause within about an hour and a half, describing it as “an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem.”

“The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges.”

Customers did not need to take any action. AWS paused further updates, meaning the incorrect figures already shown would not increase while engineers worked on the problem.

AWS billing estimates reach $2.5 trillion

Reports on Reddit and Hacker News illustrated the scale of the error. One Reddit user whose AWS charges totaled just $0.19 last month received an estimated bill of nearly $2.5 billion. Other users reported estimates ranging from $126,000 to $2.5 trillion, while Hacker News users described figures in the billions.

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AWS stressed that the numbers were inaccurate estimates, not actual customer charges. The company initially warned that restoring accurate data could take multiple hours because it needed to recompute the estimates.

Amazon later updated the AWS Health Dashboard to say it had identified and mitigated the underlying issue. It began backfilling data in the Cost Management Console and said all customers should see corrected amounts by noon Pacific time on Saturday, July 18.