AWS Glitch Shows Users Trillion-Dollar Bills

An AWS billing glitch briefly turned ordinary cloud bills into trillion-dollar shocks. Users around the world reported seeing inflated charges and alerts, even though Amazon says the figures were never applied to customer invoices.

Bharath, an X user based in India, posted a statement showing $1,499,659,180,107 in charges and wrote:

“My soul left my body.”

The statement showed a 744,728,201,771% increase for the month, implying a previous bill of roughly $200. According to The Guardian, U.K.-based marketer Dan Harvey saw his bill jump from 43 cents the previous month to $7.8 billion, despite the month still being in progress. Harvey told the newspaper he “almost had a heart attack” and had to contact AWS support to investigate.

AWS explains the inflated totals

Amazon said the incident was resolved and that on July 16 and 17, customers received erroneous budget and cost-anomaly alerts. They also saw inflated estimated usage and cost data in the Billing and Cost Management Console and Cost and Usage Reports.

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Amazon said the amounts were inaccurate and did not affect customer invoices. The company’s service health dashboard provided more detail in a Saturday update.

According to AWS, a faulty configuration change was deployed on July 16. The billing system uses unit-conversion data to calculate line-item charges; the change caused updates to that data to fail. The resulting inflated costs spread to billing displays and triggered budget and anomaly alerts.

Logs on the health dashboard show AWS working on a fix for about two days before marking the incident fully resolved. Amazon apparently did not respond to The Guardian’s request for comment about the reports.