TL;DR
An AWS billing error sent users bills estimated in billions and trillions. Amazon confirmed this was a unit pricing error and is recalculating all estimates.
AWS users woke up on Friday to find estimated billing emails showing charges ranging from hundreds of millions to $2.5 trillion. The cause was a unit price error in the estimated billing calculation subsystem of the AWS Billing Console, Amazon confirmed. A Reddit user whose charges totaled $0.19 last month received an estimated bill of nearly $2.5 billion. Others reported estimated monthly charges between $126,000 and $2.5 billion.
“Billing estimates shown do not reflect actual usage or charges,AWS said. The company identified the root cause within 90 minutes and described it as “an issue with the unit price within the estimated billing calculation subsystem.” AWS stopped estimated bill updates so the inflated numbers would not increase further and said it had begun recalculating all billing data. The corrected amounts should appear by Saturday, July 18 at noon Pacific Time.
The bug caused panic before users realized it. it was a mistake. “I almost had a heart attack when my two S3 buckets with a few MB of data generated a forecast of 500 million dollars.” one Reddit user wrote. Another posted: “Needless to say, I panicked and destroyed everything because of this account.” AWS committed $1 billion for AI engineers deployed last weekand the billing error is an unwelcome reminder that infrastructure running AI workloads worth billions per month is also capable of generating billing errors of the same magnitude.
The incident comes a day after a separate AWS CloudFront outage resulted in errors instead of websites. Cloud infrastructure is handling unprecedented spending volumes As demand for AI pushes monthly IT bills into the hundreds of millions for individual customers, making billing system reliability a bigger issue than when larger bills were measured in the thousands.
