• 2 min read
AWS Customers Hit by $1.5 Trillion Billing Error
AWS customers received erroneous bills as high as $1.5 trillion after a billing-system failure. The company took the system offline to recalculate charges.
Image: iXBT
Amazon Web Services customers received monthly bills as high as $1.5 trillion for subscriptions that normally cost less than a cup of coffee, after a computer failure disrupted the company’s billing system.
“I nearly had a heart attack when I received an email from Amazon Web Services notifying me about a bill for an app used to audit school grounds,” Dan Harvey, head of marketing at Hampshire-based charity Learning Through Landscapes, told The Guardian. The service usually costs the organization less than £1 per month. Its new bill showed a charge of $7.8 billion (£5.8 billion), compared with 43 cents the previous month.
“I had to dig quite deeply with our technical support team while I was in a state of panic, trying to work out what was happening with our account.”
Another customer, Bharat, posted a screenshot showing that his usage had increased by 745,728,201,771% from the previous month.
“I just saw $1.5 trillion on my AWS bill and my soul left my body.”
Sachin, a student in Delhi who normally pays $1.28 per month, was billed $10.9 billion. “Could you investigate this?” he asked AWS support.
Andrea Zuvich, owner of The Seventeenth Century Lady website, said she endured “half an hour of terrible, extreme stress” after being told her subscription had been priced at $245 billion—almost as much as Jeff Bezos' fortune, according to Forbes. Her usual bill is about $15 per month.
Recommended reading
Microsoft delays Exchange PowerShell credential shutdown
“You can imagine how surprised we were. Seriously, this could have caused great distress to some people and even led to health problems.”
Another customer said he was horrified to learn that he apparently owed the Seattle-based company $256 billion, asking: “How could this have happened?”
AWS begins recalculating customer bills
After 90 minutes of investigation, AWS identified a “unit pricing issue in the billing calculation subsystem” and took the billing system offline.
The company said it expected a complete fix to take several hours while it recalculated the data used to determine the estimated amounts due. The erroneous figures were billing notifications, not evidence that customers had actually consumed services worth trillions of dollars.
Enterprise Editor
Marcus follows the money. He covers enterprise software, cloud architecture, and the tectonic shifts in Big Tech strategy. He translates dense earnings calls and complex M&A activity into actionable insights about where the industry is actually heading. If a tech giant makes a silent pivot, Marcus is usually the first to notice.
via iXBT
