Most of us feel like we’re in an affordability crisis these days. If you’re like me, you’re helpless and complacent in the box even when you feel like you’re being mugged. But being billed billions (or even trillions) more than you owe for web hosting would shake anyone out of their affordability daze.
Amazon Web Services users around the world have noticed one such bug:
I just saw $1.5 trillion on my AWS bill and my soul left my body https://t.co/EgfQKJTHVl pic.twitter.com/L0gXYbDio7
– Bharat (@Bharath_uwu) July 17, 2026
Bharath, an X user based in India, showed what appears to be a cost statement of $1,499,659,180,107 and writes: “my soul left my body.” That statement says that Bharath’s total has increased by 744,728,201,771% this month, which means, by my calculations, that the previous month’s bill was about $200.
According to the guardiana marketing specialist named Dan Harvey, who works for a nonprofit education in the United Kingdom said he “almost had a heart attack” after watching a bill rise from 43 cents last month to $7.8 billion this month, and the month wasn’t even over. Harvey added to The Guardian that he had to get on the phone with tech support and “do a lot of research” to get to the bottom of it. Amazon apparently did not respond to The Guardian’s request for comment.
This has been resolved, according to Amazonwhich writes that on July 16 and 17, “customers received erroneous budget and cost anomaly detection alerts, and saw inflated usage data and cost estimates in the Billing and Cost Management Console and Cost and Usage Reports.” The amounts are “inaccurate” and “did not affect customer bills,” Amazon writes, but everything is apparently back to normal.
A Saturday update in AWS service status dashboard exposes what happened. Apparently, a faulty “configuration change” was implemented in the AWS billing system on July 16. “This system relies on unit conversion data to calculate line item charges,” AWS writes, but the change “caused unit conversion data updates to fail, resulting in inflated line item costs, which propagated to the billing and cost management console and triggered alerts for budget and cost anomalies.”
The logs in the status dashboard show that AWS attempts to deploy a fix for approximately two days before marking the issue as fully resolved.
