AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
7 days ago
URL already posted: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
I've got an estimated bill for $1.7 BILLION over this month. Normal usage is < $5.
Obvs have created an urgent AWS support ticket. Anyone else seeing something like this?
Update: Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1uyuaw7/help_my_bill_s...
Ive dealt with this error at AWS. It’s a unit error. In my case we _meant_ to charge like 5¢/GB, but missed the unit (GB), and then the billing system defaults to bytes. 5¢ per Byte of data transferred meant some customers were seeing MM bills within hours. Got paged by support around 2am, had it fixed and amendments issues by 3-4am, apology emails shortly after.
Services emit metering values that arent directly tied to prices. Every SKU/line item is defined in a “pricing plan”, with a unit type, regions, and price per unit. The metering records are joined to a pricing plan based on account id, region, sku, etc. mess up the unit type in the pricing plan and the metering data conversion doesnt work, and you get crazy bills.
No tests? Just mess up some mundane detail [1] and voila! Wake-up calls and heart attacks for 100,000s of administrators?
1: "Oh, well, this is not a mundane detail, Michael!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo
There will have been tests, but there will have been missing end-to-end tests. Test 1 will verify that the new system/product emits billing entries in some expected way ("We did 100 bytes of operations and we see we called the billing system for 100 bytes of stuff, yay, test pass"). Test 2 will be in the billing system ("We provide an incoming bill for SKU#12345 for 100 gigabyte-units and we see it costs $17, yay, test passes"). But they won't test the two things together because it will be harder to do and the teams will have different management chains. Seen it happen several times at several companies. Somebody will have said at some point "we should actually have the tests charge money" and somebody else will have said "well we can't have the tests actually charge money, that's a legal/accounting problem, it might even be a crime" and then nobody would have asked what the next best thing was.
19 replies →
Not even tests but just some basic anomaly detection lol.
Like maybe if the bill amounts increase by like 10M% there should be someone that looks into it
41 replies →
>no tests?
Earlier this week my slopservant implemented several comprehensive changes to a codebase.
It also wrote extensive tests to verify the correctness of the changes.
A few days later I was working on something else and realized, everything had been implemented backwards, in a way that was nonsensical and also completely pointless.
The many tests it had written were just confirming the LLM's idea of correctness, which turned out to be... completely incorrect.
I laughed when I realized, if I had been using Rust, or indeed, formal verification, that wouldn't have helped at all — it would have just written a mathematical proof, proving the correctness of the wrong thing!
Not sure what lesson to take from that (except read the damn diffs, obviously — it was a hobby project okay ;), but it seems like the more reliable this stuff gets, the more we expect it to work properly, the more risky it becomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
8 replies →
This reminds me of a discussion a few months back from a BSD maintainer who had done a lot of volunteer work for AWS over the years. I think he might have even been the person who alerted them to the insecurity of IMDSv1. There was a sense that AWS might have had great talented developers at the time, but they clearly didn't really understand the domain of running a hypervisor service exposed to the public. This feels like a similar situation, where I'm sure they "test" what they know to test, in the way they know, but compared to a bank, well, it wouldn't surprise me the least if no one at AWS ever even thought to ask banks how they handle things like this. Instead of testing that a process works the way you specified it, you need to make sure you even have the right specification in the first place by consulting with prior art and ensuring whatever you translate into software reflects the legal reality of the process you're trying to encode.
There's a similar thing with physical processes. My wife works in geointelligence ground processing and encountered this when her system was expanded to support SAR collections instead of just visual spectrum. Software that passed all of its internal tests was passing nonsense collection parameters because the developers didn't understand the difference between energy collected to a sensor cell reflected from the sun versus energy reflected from your own active scan. The capabilities and limitations aren't the same. You can perform the same processing. The bits on disk won't care. But if the process you encode doesn't accurately correspond to the physics of reality, you're producing nonsense. Memory-safe, syntactically-valid nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless.
This seems to happen quite a bit with software companies.
3 replies →
we invoice clients monthly. if we ever sent one a bill 2^30 times too high, I don't think "estimated charges, no action required" would save the relationship :D
Who needs tests when you have vibes?
It's just like in Superman III
It’s fractions of a penny Peter.
I'm sorry but anyone that sees a multi million or billion dollar bill on an account that does nowhere near that should not be scared. It's obviously a mistake. Stories like this have happened with banks in my country. Check your account and you have billions in there. Guess what happened to those that withdrew money? The judge told them any reasonable person would know this is a bug. Had to give it back. Same thing here, any reasonable person doesn't get scared.
3 replies →
What could a banana possibly cost Michael, ten dollars?
...in the off chance that one in 100,000 will pay their bill instead of dropping dead from a heart attack (perhaps because there's a heartless OpenClaw running their accounting department), it's all worth it.
Why would you think there are "no tests"?
11 replies →
I wonder if AWS billing still uses CSV files for passing data around.
IIRC it was one of my first on-calls at AWS over a decade ago now, and I got a page early evening because some stuff we did with billing records broke because some "smart" engineer thought it'd be a great idea to put an experimental record in with a description something like "I wonder what happens if I put, a comma in this field", into the production record. I watched region after region fail the same way as the record spread. That one engineer made a mess of lots of people's evenings. They could have used the test endpoint, but no. Much better to test in production!
That was just a massive operational failure, not the fault of any single engineer. No change, except hotfixes, should be able to land on prod unless it has at least go through test, staging, and at the scale of Amazon, shadow testing.
Engineers will do what engineers will always want to do, they want to see how things break, and sometimes they manage to fix it.
4 replies →
Give that engineer a raise and an official title of "chaos monkey".
On the scale of AWS, you want your production system to be poked at and pushed against. Obviously not something to implement out of the blue in your production if you've never had it. But certainly worth considering.
Even on a smaller scale, it makes a lot of sense to have some deamon randomly bringing nodes down, shut off a database, fill a disk up, etc etc. In production.
Because that brings awareness to all engineers that the stuff that "can happen", will happen. It makes for a culture of defensive, considerate engineering. A culture where someone who finds bugs or holes in production is rewarded, not punished.
A culture where having some automated management for nodes is not a ticket "at the bottom the backlog", but a crucial attribute when picking or engineering the hosting system. That having redundancy in critical services like a database, is not an expense, but actually a cost saver, because chance of critical services failing is 100%, rather then some made up gut-feeling-chance. That the error handling and tests for when a module cannot write a file to disk isn't something that "this senior who left 8 months ago overengineered", but a pattern to be consistently implemented¹. etc.
---
¹ It is one the things I love about rust, that it has built in enforcement for you to deal with all the esoteric errors (e.g. https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/io/enum.ErrorKind.html#variant...) that can occur. Sure, you can write `File::create("foo.txt").unwrap()` but even then, you have made a conscious decision, clearly "documented" that you will crash the program - i.e. postponed the decisions on what (groups of) errors must be handled in what way, to a time you have the information to make that decision. Same design decision with go, where errors are explicitly to be handled by the programmer.
1 reply →
CSV files are widely known to be used by the most frugal companies so of course it is.
2 replies →
It was the same old kona files for metering until at least a ‘23-24 when I last did metering/pricing work. “Luckily” the size of the EC2 pricing plan was so stupidly large that it was forcing improvements to how those were serialized, and how private pricing plans were created/assigned to different payer ids.
1 reply →
This isn't a flippant comment. Imagine though, being presented with this. Imagine having some underlying health problem (e.g. cardiovascular).
Do not be surprised if real people actually die from this mistake, from the anxiety, the surprise, the helplessness.
But someone that susceptible is likely going to have a bad reaction to many possible unexpected things. How would they react to a minor traffic accident? a family member getting hurt? a letter from tax authorities asking questions?
Having that serious an underlying health problem means everyday life represents risk for you. I don't think that means everyone else has to behave differently wrt (in this case wrt to billing mistakes) to keep you healthy.
1 reply →
actually $17B isn't so bad because it's so obviously an error and not something you can fatfinger. if you expected it to be $17 and it was $17,000 you'd be much more worried as that looks like a plausible error on your part
1 reply →
its so far out as to be obviously not real
a smaller error by say, just one or two orders of magnitude are much more believable as a reader
2 replies →
[dead]
> Services emit metering values that arent directly tied to prices.
Yep. The metering ("Kona") is separated from the billing to such degree that it's basically impossible to find anyone at the company who understands both.
I remember having to work on some metering code, and trying to figure out whether it would result in correct billing that matched our service's documentation. I was basically told off by a more senior engineer for wasting my time on something that was completely tangential and outside of the "engineering" domain entirely.
This is why I always fail loud rather than pick a stupid default.
The last thing a billing system should have is defaults, this is such an insane thing.
Hey man, vibe coders gonna vine code. No wait. Loop enginering.
We don't need to do stupid things like review or plan or strategize. Put everything into LLM and let the black box take over everything! Yay! LLMs!!!!
Were there cases of finalized invoices and fund transfers while the error was in place?
The sudden loss of working capital while awaiting a refund would be extremely disruptive for even large businesses.
Are you able to just re-run the data for the timeframe, or is "fixing it" a more manual process? And what observability are you working with into the process?
What apology letters? Never got anything, not even a reply to my support tickets.
Had it been half a million dollars or something or say like a few hundred dollars?
Was this the day that gp3 EBS volumes came out by any chance?
Nope, different service. We were introducing new methods using POST and (iirc) some differential pricing based on the actual request params. Which made it a different code path, metering value, price, etc than the existing GET requests.
"I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. I always mess up some mundane detail."
Unit mistakes happen all the time, which is why you should be using your units library religiously and still being vigilant even then.
Worst case I've found was off by 15 orders of magnitude.
13 replies →
Multiple rockets exploded and space missions failed because of the imperial vs. metric BS, and those mistakes were made by people all with PhDs or equivalences. This is still pretty mild in comparison haha.
Units and datetime will always be the bane of any professions ...
1 reply →
Imagine a programming language that has physical measurement unit support so this could have never happened.
Like F#...? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fsharp/language-ref...
1 reply →
[dead]
I got 3 consecutive emails warning that my budget crossed its $18 threshold. Opened it up: cost was 78 million. Thought it was a phishing attempt, logged into my actual account, and... still 78 million. EMOTIONAL DAMAGE.
Wanna bet the description of this job post will be updated by the end of the day?
"Software Development Engineer II, AWS Invoicing"
https://www.amazon.jobs/de/jobs/10428480/software-developmen...
"...Our platforms are powered by generative AI, large language models, knowledge graphs, and agentic architectures that dynamically compose specialized agents based on context. We apply these capabilities across three reinforcing areas: intelligent launch readiness — where autonomous AI agents analyze, generate, and validate the information needed to go live in a new market; cloud-native service orchestration — where configuration-driven microservices replace per-launch bespoke engineering with centralized, reusable capabilities so that expanding into a new country becomes a zero-code configuration change rather than a development cycle; and continuous validation..."
Wow:
This is invoicing? If ever there was a domain that was purely deterministic, you'd hope it was invoicing.
17 replies →
> 194,400.00 USD annually
Fuck it, im in.
6 replies →
That job description feels so far beyond parody that I could scarcely believe it until opening the link! What a world.
9 replies →
IRE which stands for Invoice Reliability Engineer.
Mine was just over $1 billion. I thought the email was a phish at first and almost trashed it, but it seemed otherwise very real, so I logged in to AWS just to check. Then I almost had a heart attack when I looked at my billing estimate. Eventually I saw a banner on the support page, but my question is why wasn’t there a banner on the page SAYING I OWE A BILLION DOLLARS?!
To paraphrase the old joke, if you wake up with a $78,000 AWS bill, you have a problem. If you wake up with a $78 million AWS bill, Amazon has a problem.
I did too, those awstrack.me URL's look super suspicious and I hadn't seen this alert trigger before so didn't know what to expect.
At first I was sure it was a phishing attempt. Then went to the console (not using those links) Saw there was an outage where the console was wrong (no mention of email alerts) Then I thought I was hacked - what a perfect cover up for someone to evade detection when the console was wrong. Looked at some logs, realized the incident text was just not exhaustive on the impact. Went back to my cup of coffee.
Note to self- should have looked here first.
Enterprise account . We got - 3trillion and change
-$3 trillion! That's the highest earning investment that has ever existed!
3.7 billion. Offered to pay it in monthly installments. Haven’t hears back
Quick do your IPO before the books update
1 reply →
same. over 2t in one day.
The real fun comes later when the US Federal Government taxes us on the forgiven debt as income.
The finance fun noone knows about. I knew someone who did this as revenge. Sent some asshole a fake invoice for US$stupidmoney for a couple of months which said asshole ignored, then sent a certified mail 'I forgive asshole US$stupidmoney', and copied the IRS. IRS went to collect on the unpaid taxes, and if you've never been there, the IRS does not play when it comes to that sort of money. I don't know how it ended, but there were multiple lawyers involved, so it was expensive no matter what.
Yes, I am taking legal action, no doubt.
Why? What's the damages? They showed you a wrong number, then later acknowledged it and fixed it. Just because the number was "very big" to you doesn't mean you were actually aggrieved in some way.
5 replies →
…for emotional damage?
2 replies →
Please do not open up emails directly always login to your account.
Time to get a second job buddy.
It's crazy enough this will be fixed soon.
Years ago I found an actual hidden error in my bill. (This was early 2010s). The system was calculating the EC2 reservation savings incorrectly for some of my servers. I was crunching all their detailed usage data on a regular basis in an 18 tab spreadsheet and couldn't get it to fully reconcile. I spent months trying to track down the discrepancy. Once I found it, I had to convince AWS their system was wrong, which took another big chunk of time. Meanwhile the discrepancy continued to accumulate.
After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS. I've never seen a calculation error on their part since.
> After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS.
$7,000 of credits is no problem. At that time a friendly neighborhood PM or director could issue the credit without much oversight.
Your problem is the time period. Amending a bill in the same cycle is EZ. Fixing the previous cycle is a PITA but pretty common. Issuing amendments for the previous financial _years_ would be a huuuuge PITA going through finance etc.
Banks and financial institutions are the same. If they haven’t issued you a monthly/quarterly statement yet, they can just apologize and tell you the numbers are wrong please wait for the statement. But it is a major issue if an actual statement has the wrong numbers.
Reminds me of working for a cable company and being told that even if we screwed up and stole from the customer the look back period was only a few months and if we found an error from before that we weren't supposed to correct it.
3 replies →
A couple of my coworkers think I’m nuts for watching cost explorer so closely but
1. The time it takes to look and notice costs that don’t make sense easily pays for itself, and then some (in my experience). I doubt you spent $7k of your time tracking this down, and you probably noticed optimization opportunities that saved you even more
2. I hate the idea of wasting money on buying Jeff Bezos a bigger yacht
I've personally noticed and saved multiple $xx,xxx monthly cost billing spikes just by take a daily glance at our cost explorer. I'm in the AWS accounts every day doing investigative work anyway that an extra 30-60 seconds is trivial.
Seeing something "small" like an ECS task that is continuously failing to start properly because of a bug and repeatedly pulls a container image or a lambda function that's taking longer that it reasonably should (takes 5-10 seconds when it's normally a tens or a few hundred milliseconds) can dramatically drive up a bill in short order.
> 2. I hate the idea of wasting money on buying Jeff Bezos a bigger yacht
Then you aren't using AWS. At least half of all the money you give to Amazon is yacht money.
2 replies →
Do you just watch for trends? Curious to know your process to verify if the cost is right or wrong.
>> It's crazy enough this will be fixed soon.
Its going on for 12 hours. Looks like the humans can´t understand the agentic code that was checked in....
Apparently what used to be `GB of storage consumed` is confused with `Bytes of storage consumed`, leading to a cool off by 2*30 error.
> You're right to question my calculation. The MCP server failed to connect when I tried to look up the field definition. I guessed instead of validating. This is on me. But look at all the revenue!
The user is asking me to calculate how much money they should charge their customer. The values they've given me are 0.45, 1.67, and 2.50. This is 2.50 + 1.67 + 0.45 = 4.62, but it could be any other number. Perhaps we should be concatenating the numbers instead. Wait! The . could also mean multiplication. 0 . 45 . 1. 67 . 2 . 50 = 3015000. But wouldn't multiplying by 0 zero it out? That can't be right, we wouldn't be charging anything. So 3015000 must be correct.
You should charge your customer 3015000 thousand dollars.
Would be funny if it wasn't so close to true
2 replies →
So uh did you type that out or generate it somewhere?
Number felt high so I wanted to double check and I only get 301500.
1 reply →
> You're right to question my calculation.
Literally impossible to tell whether this is parody or an actual response any longer.
I challenge anyone to write something so stupid that an LLM couldn't possibly respond with it. I don't believe such limit exists.
Vibecoded the billing system, raised revenue 9000%. Great for that promo package.
Just today I gave my local agent a CSV which listed a bunch files with of human readable size units and asked it to count rows in each GB range. Sounds simple enough but it completely miscalculated, because it parsed MB as GB for some reason. In hindsight it would've be quicker just to do it in Excel or something.
I've found personally it's better to use AI to build a deterministic script for calculations like that. (anything that manipulates data should be a script not an AI).
2 replies →
That is literally what Excel is for. Why didn't you use that first of all?
2 replies →
Oh great so 2*30=60 he only owes 28.3$ million... hehe
I guess you wanted to say 2^30 which makes 1.5$
My hunch is the HN formatter swallowed the double asterisk typical of python exponents.
While we're being pedantic, 2^30 is 28 in normal programming languages ;)
But 2^30 is 28.
This error could be fixed with better typing. If you compute on GiB in a billing system, make sure it can only ever be mutated with a GiB type!
AI slop. Or just a distracted dev
>> Or just a distracted dev
And a distracted tester? And a distracted pipeline of regression tests?
No, the truth is way worst...
7 replies →
Either way it shows their QA and testing procedures are incompetent. It's just not acceptable for a utility like AWS to move fast and break shit. Should make you question whether it's safe or advisable to use any of their services.
It probably shouldn't be legal for banks, hospitals, governments, or any other critical infrastructure to be hosted on AWS if they do things like this.
Woke up to a billing alarm email. Thought I had leaked my AWS keys accidentally and somehow run up 437 billion dollars of charges. Joke's on them though, I don't have 437 billion dollars
Anyways I didn't need coffee. That produced an adrenaline release unlike any I've experienced before. Thanks AWS
If you owe AWS 437k bucks, that’s a big problem for you
If you owe AWS 437B bucks, that’s a big problem for AWS
Far less scary than a smaller amount
This number is obviously absurd but for other normal amount (say 2 million which can definitely happen with a mistake), can't they claim it in court that will bankrupt you even if your entire worth is just 100K for example?
I wonder how many people may have gotten an actual heart infarct because of that. There may be a person out there that may be dead as a result.
It's entirely irresponsible of Amazon to even display such values to the user.
Reminds me of the time a Robinhood user killed themselves after Robinhood erroneously showed their account balance at -$730k.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55990461
2 replies →
Ah, there'll be something in the TOS absolving them of responsibility.
2 replies →
I legit had a small panic attack due to this.
I'm not a devops but we are running some s3 buckets. When I saw the number I couldn't even comprehend and thought we had been hacked.
I feel like this is such a bad mistake from AWS and we will never be compensated for it.
Put me off having anything on AWS from now on.
Worth a shot to give them a call and explain that. They can probably adjust it down to 100 billion.
What is this, US health care negotiations?
3 replies →
I went through a two month long fight with AWS over a compromised account. I lost 20K even when my previous usage for the last 3 years was like $20/month, and I had more invoices coming worth tens of thousands of dollars. AWS refused to help until I stopped the breach myself, which required me to spend several all nighters after work learning how to script for AWS infra. They also refused to close my account after the breach was under control. They asked me to sign a shared responsibility agreement before they could look at my case, which I refused to do. I finally contacted the AG office in my state and they email AWS directly. In less than 24h I had a AWS manager calling me to fix my account and issue a refund for the 20K. Still, they refused to close my account after all this ordeal, apparently there’s no way for you to completely get out of AWS once you are in. It’s the shittiest business ever.
I had a similar situation where some dormant account was still charging my credit card.
The account was probably real, made for some purpose 15 years ago. I had ignored the charge for years because it was like $7 a month. Then it went to $300/month, making it worth the time. I could find no invoice email and none of my AWS accounts lined up with the bill.
I tried contacting support, but without the account number involved they had no way to help. I disputed the charge, the bank refunded that month and then went right back to charging the next month(my credit card helpfully accepted the charges despite the dispute).
I had to cancel the credit card entirely to make it stop.
Same story for $500 million. I was shaking so bad I couldn't type my password.
huge irl laugh at “i don’t have 437 billion dollars”
“Best I can do for you is $3.75 and a cup of coffee.”
Clearly the Agentic AI is running free on AWS. Matt does it again...what a success...
I was trying to go to sleep when I got mine. It was certainly above the $16 threshold I had set!
Ask for some leniency. Let your account rep know about your budget difficulties and ask if you can make good faith payments of a few billion per month until you get back on your feet.
Ummm no. Do not show a sign of weakness like this. Address the problem head on and get a credit card with a bigger limit.
If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $1.7 billion, that's the bank's problem.
I saw this in action on a smaller scale. In a past job, my wife organized events for a decent sized company. After an event, she'd typically have a $300k+ balance on her corporate Amex. When she went on maternity leave, the person filling in for her job neglected to actually pay the bills, so when she returned there were quite a few emails and voicemails from Amex regarding the over $500k balance.
The messages started as polite and eventually started to get more desperate in tone. At no point were they threatening or adversarial.
I think that this might reflect more on Amex to be honest.
Amex realises that threatening would hurt their business trust more than anything. During the great depression, Amex accepted checks from other banks which were falling and paying through their own wallet as a matter of integrity. Amex has always been built around this idea of trust and prestige.
They make most of money from what I have heard on the transaction fees which are more than others (3% compared to 1%). They might get desperate but I am sure that they are one of the last guys who would wanna threaten you if you are paying some large bills for them (as compared to normal credit card companies which might even hire people to extract your loans in some messy situations)
So perhaps be so rich that the credit card company understands it as well and treats ya differently :-D
2 replies →
This joke only works if you actually impose a cost on AWS of 1.7 billion. If they just serve you a bill for no reason, it's still your problem.
Next question we'll find out is what if you owe the bank $1.7 trillion?
That's the government's problem
The Federal Reserve? You ressurect Alan Greenspan, and tell him to brrrrr.
Not if you’re Elon Musk
Not because of his net worth (he is probably worth 200bn if it came to liquidating) but because he will pull some trick to get the money. Maybe he will chuck SpaceX under debt, draw a dividend then set up a 1000 year payment plan with the bank.
Elon Musk is everyone's problem
2 replies →
AWS saw Anthropic billing a guy for $16 million on zero usage and thought, why stop at the millions?
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/320266/20260712/anthropic...
>AI billing audit startup Vaudit reviewed $34 million in AI invoices submitted by 60 enterprise customers and found approximately $1.7 million in mistaken overcharges — a billing error rate of roughly five percent.
That sounds bad.
I realized recently that Whole Foods no longer automatically and reliably detects your Chase Amazon Prime credit card when paying. So they don’t give you the discounted pricing automatically. I wonder how many customers are checking out the way they always do and are paying full price when, for years and decades, this worked fine.
The customer service people I talked to in the grocery store said this changed sometime in the last year. My guess is that it’s an unintended side effect of removing the pay-by-palm feature.
This is obviously unrelated but I joked about what else Amazon wasn’t reliably calculating….
Class action lawsuit time!
Either that or 1000’s of small claims court cases.
Even with arbitration, the overhead of dealing with that would be crippling. Hopefully someone over there decides to do the right thing, and auto-refund.
Relevant to this, I've recently noticed a trend of mass tort cases being opened up in the past couple years, and they seem to do very well. The way these seem to work is attorneys identify a company who has clearly ripped people off, and what I presume is a repeatable way to guarantee a win (thus translating to a guaranteed settlement offer). Then they advertise for eligible clients, sign those clients individually to contingency agreements, and run the playbook. A couple months ago after signing up for one of these, I received a check for about $350 (after the agreed-upon 40% attorney fee), from Ticketmaster, and I had another one related to AT&T. It took about 10 minutes more effort from me than a typical class-action settlement, because I had to e-sign those representation papers.
So really, there's a third option now, that's much easier than class action, even when class actions don't get certified.
There are a hundred small things like this that seem to be popping up in what used to be simple and reliable systems and as much as I know they aren’t ALL because of vibe coding I can’t help but wonder how much is.
Weirder is what happened a day later. I got an email that said my Chase Amazon Prime credit card was being re-associated with my Amazon.com account.
I never reported this nor took it up with either Amazon or Chase directly. There was a refund of my Whole Foods purchase (they needed to void my purchase and re-ring everything to give me the discounts.. I asked them to refund my purchase and I’d do without my Whole Foods purchase entirely).
Looking back I think at least 3 recent visits were charged to me at full price because of all this. Hard not to think of enshittification and whether Amazon Prime is even worth it, alas.. I live in a fairly rural area at the moment and need delivery.
I got a 20K bill once and it was actually drafted from my bank account. It took me a couple of months and involving the office of the AG of my state to get the issue resolved and get my money back. Since then I never touched any AWS product, moved my small stuff to Azure. It’s been years since AWS have these issues with billing, you can find the stories online, students billed 60K for a compromised account launching servers to mine crypto which AWS somehow was unable to flag and block, and let run for months.
AWS is basically a utility. I think it's inevitable that their carelessness around billing will end up with them being regulated like one.
I can't think of another regulated utility that doesn't provide service to (essentially) all humans directly in their homes.
Everyone knows what water and electricity are, the vast majority couldn't explain what service AWS provides.
2 replies →
That’s why you always use a spend limited card with variable cost providers.
Or just own your own hardware. Spend a few bucks at Microcenter, build a machine, and there's simply no mechanism by which they could decide later that you should actually pay 100x more, and then magically suck it out of your bank account.
None of this can happen unless you first cede control.
Most debit/prepaid cards will get rejected. Credit Cards technically have a limit but they really don't. It's an open line to your finances.
3 replies →
For a while I had a portion of my "homelab" on AWS. I was an educator in a classroom where the students were learning cloud stuff, and the instructor was encouraging the students to stand-up cloud environments for learning, so I figured that I would do the same.
I used AWS' free tier, of course, and I enjoyed the initial setup in EC2, and I did a LAMP-stack MediaWiki installation. It wasn't too difficult, but two things sent me away forever.
1. It was impossible, or at least highly labor-intensive, in this modern era to adequately secure an ordinary Linux system running Internet-facing services. I put fail2ban and I filtered a lot of ports, and still spammers attacked me on Layer 7.
2. It was impossible, actually impossible, to limit or cap my cloud expenses in any billing cycle. Sure, run free-tier all I want. Sure, come in within the limits almost every month. But if I configured one thing wrong, or one thing went runaway, I'd have a sizable bill that I couldn't dispute. And even worse, those "runaways" weren't necessarily things in my sphere of control, but could be triggered by basically anyone coming in and using my VPC resources, especially egress network traffic.
So I closed out my cloud account, and I developed a lot of sympathy for businesses and corps that now are forced to run "in the cloud" rather than on-prem or their own machine rooms, but now they have no way to control expenses.
This is why traditional bare metal and VPS rental wins for any kind of private or small business use.
I wouldn't expect their detection of hacked accounts to be 100% correct. Sure, it might be obvious when a human takes a look, but humans can't proactively look at every account's usage.
> I got a 20K bill once and it was actually drafted from my bank account.
Service provider lesson #1: Never ever ever enable auto-pay! The convenience (and even the savings, if applicable) aren't worth the risk of the service provider autonomously slurping up all your money.
Right, and good luck getting a correct bill from Azure. And when you are finally fed up, it will take months to close your Azure account.
Exactly. It seems like a step down in every way.
You folks are completely irresponsible with your finances. I only spent $2.4 million last night. You've got to learn to manage your money.
Yeah, buy less cappuchinos and avocado toast so you can pay your AWS bills people!
I need to drink/eat those too to feel like I'm an AWS ops guy!
Probably the safest bet is to pay your bill in full to stay in good standing and then get refunded the difference when they revise it down.
With interest, of course.
Probably the closest I've ever been to getting a heart attack. Normally <$1 per month, and now suddenly $284,006,266,443.74. Whatever the bug is on their end, this is unforgivable.
Yeah, this one is bad because it’s off by so much I’m shocked it wasn’t caught by tests, alerts about unusual changes in the billing system, or even accounting. Like surely the P&L reports look all kinds of wrong right now, they have to be showing like 6M% profit margins and revenue measured in quadrillions.
I’m also a little surprised this didn’t trip a circuit breaker. For something as non-real-time as billing, I’m surprised they don’t have an automated kill switch that pauses the billing system and fires a page if variance in bills spikes. Naively some kind of “if the standard deviation of customer bills for this year changes by more than 50%, pause the billing system”. At that number of customers, those numbers should be pretty stable beyond internal billing changes they could normalize for.
If I were to guess this bug is in the "display" part of the system which is probably distinct from the "actually take money from the customer" part of the system. One can imagine they have gates on the "actually take money" part, especially for a large bill like ours which was ~$300b or about 2.5x AWS' 2025 revenue... In one month. Surely if we had actually accumulated that bill they would be the ones with the problems when we can't pay it.
1 reply →
I don’t know how something like this makes it to prod. That’s multiple levels of failure.
Same here. I got an email with a bill of $233 million and an estimated $433 million until the end of the month. I panicked and nuked my entire setup (which wasn't used that much, anyway, the alert threshold was $1) - I really wonder how many people did the same.
It's been 2 hours and I still haven't fully calmed down.
I did the same! I was trembling all day!
Same - just had some malicious bots running through my platform last week and really thought they found a security hole after all. Even though the amount sounded ridicoulus, I got quite nervous and a very bad feeling when I logged-in AWS and saw that price.
Same. Cold sweat for about 20 minutes. Even though I saw the service health notification, I still spent the last hour trying to find where my storage spiked. In any case, I'll be tearing down plenty of stale infra after this!
The should pass a law saying they should have to pay you the amount over the correct bill as compensation; I bet they'll stop making mistakes like this pretty quickly after that
This is embarrassing for Amazon, but I’d take laughably wrong over subtly wrong any day. If the bug made bills 20% higher I probably wouldn’t have queried it.
Vibe coding billing systems is a top-notch idea :)
Hey what do you think about vibe coding weapon systems? Do you want to be my cofounder?
We retro-fitted a Terminator T100 model with the brain of the latest LLM models, and then gave'em 2 shotguns...and, you'll never guess what happened next!
Well, actually i guess you can guess what happens next! lol :-D
How about vibe coded health care systems.
Sure! What could possibly go wrong?
3 replies →
I once got a credit card statement that said estimated time to repay ....... more than 100,000 years. It was discouraging but I did pay it off. And sooner than estimated.
That's good for the credit card company, they can project stable revenue 100k years into the future.
Were you still alive after paying it off?
No, but they have the internet in the afterlife, apparently.
2 replies →
Generational credit card debt.
“Bank error in your favor, collect $100”
My estimate was only $21M (vs ~$0.01 average bill). Wish I had checked status sooner and saved myself the panic!
My process went: verify email is not phishing (it was), login to console and check dashboard (same amount), attempt to understand cost (cost management kept contradicting itself), try to log support ticket and only on that part did I notice the status notification. At least I can breathe again now!
same process, same near heart attack - especially some days ago I had malicious activity on my platform and thought that now they actually found something.
Apparently you can trigger an Action (e.g. prevent uploads) when the billing alert triggers, but then my platform wouldn't work anymore, just because AWS had an issue. Also insane that Amazon still hasn't send an email to clarify.
News to me! Since my usage is just a hobby app I’m definitely implementing this action response - thank you
A friend of mine went through the same - he got an alert for bill over budget, he logged in and boom 107M$.
I was on the phone with him and we checked that he didn’t leak any APIs keys but no traffic at all. I even thought of a breach at a vendor he uses for some s3 stuff before I found this thread on HN.
From their status page
>The second path involves rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem.
Want to bet AI code was involved?
I'm not a betting person but I am looking forward to the postmortem, whether or not AI was involved, and what their code to production verification stuff looks like now. This kind of thing should have been caught by automated tests.
There is an enormous amount of money invested in trying to prove the opposite, for this reason not only they will never admit it, they will actively negate AI was used. It happened before:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/24/aws-would-ra...
User: "I want to improve the billing system to be more efficient and só we can earn more money"
AI: "No problem, let me change how we bill and fix the tests for the new increase in value"
>Spawning Sub-Agent: "Dr. Evil"
Is it still a bet if you have 99.999% chance to win?
Do people not write tests anymore?
How is 1 + 1 = 2 hard to test?
Vibe coded implementation paired with vibe coded tests made to fit the implementation?
Reminds me of the decimal point scene in Office Space.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo
They'll never admit it.
Why would they? Changing colors on the status dashboard needs VP approval.
10 layers of approvals to get a reasonable change implemented, but this shit gets pushed to production instantly. AI is driving leaders insane - they actually believe they can stop operating with humans and take all of the money. Remember your pay is transactional. Never give them more than written in your contract, and there is no shame in playing dirty politics to advance within.
Can I bet you 437 billion dollars?
They sent 3 warnings to my email, ok, I understand bugs happen (probably vibe-coded). But they didn't even send any notification that it's a bug. Going to leave AWS after that.
Somehow I highly doubt anyone will leave AWS over this unless their use of AWS is way more low-complexity than the average account.
People make similar pronouncements after every us-east-1 outage makes the news, but I feel like AWS would be going out of business by now if people followed through.
It reminds me of airlines, where after a particularly grueling irregular ops experience, a few dozen people file off the plane swearing "Never again, <airline name>!" but really, we all must know deep down that the airlines are all subject to the same external inciting factors, internal profit motivations, and human imperfection, and thus all pretty equally likely to cause us a bad day or ruined trip. The effort spent to avoid one isn't really worth it.
Airlines are all subject to a lot of the same factors, but there are unequivocally better and worse performers in terms of on-time arrivals, by a lot. Take a look at the Air Travel Consumer report for details.
No, AWS won't go out of business, afterall, people still use IBM mainframes.
1 reply →
same
Woke up to a 100 billion dollars in S3, which is above the USD 4 alarm threshold I had set (I pay $0.55 monthly) . Some AI decided to prune the most impressionable of us.
Maybe they're using too many humans and not enough AI in their software development. That must be it.
The code base is not gigantic enough they need AI to generate massively more lines of code.
But they're going to try anyway.
2 replies →
Well AWS never had bugs before.
They need the customers to pay more so they can fix the bugs. It's self-correcting.
Yes, there is a known issue with cost estimation.
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Whatever you do, AWS, don't post a related service health alert site wide on the console. Heck, don't even post one in the billing module. We wouldn't want to overdo the alerts, especially when we already have one being displayed to market the new FinOps Agent in Public Preview.
Bit of an understatement: “The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges.”
"There are no customer actions required at this time."
Of course, you provided heart stress failure tests for free.
Thank you. Have seen this after I posted.
Thanks, I panicked logged in and could not find the root cause of the bill.
Thanks AWS, no caffeine needed this morning!
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
"Operational issue - AWS Billing Console (Global) Service - AWS Billing Console Severity Impacted - Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data"
Update as of 7:53am PDT:
"The rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue and we are continuing to investigate multiple mitigation paths. Estimated bill updates remain paused."
>Estimated bill updates remain paused
Wait what if someones actually getting usage spiked
1 reply →
One can almost smell the vibes.
This is peanuts compared to a major cybersecurity catastrophe that’s surely in the making.
To give credit to the technology and the people using it - and I’m not being facetious - it’s actually incredible that at the current levels of usage the unprecedented catastrophic event has not yet happened.
some things never change. Pre AI I was always shocked that such large and complex systems actually run as well as they do. Especially after getting to see how the sausage is made/works.
It was the mid 2010s when I sensed a lot of SaaS becoming popular. Just host your ticketing systems, your IT management planes, your security management consoles, your SOC, all off-premises.
I wonder if businesses are thinking of ever swinging back to locally hosted, with the increased hostility of the Internet re: AI, vulnerabilities, DoS, and so on.
I'm sure some businesses are considering moving back to on-prem, but for many, I suspect the cost to find onboard, and pay the SMEs to keep those systems running well enough to not fail due to one reason or another isn't as appetizing to them as the ability to offload that work, along with the legal responsibility.
When something goes wrong, pointing the finger at someone else is far easier for most than pointing it at yourself.
One thing that you need to understand is that the usual business manager absolutely hates depending on technical expertise, and that the modern corporate world is fanatically anti-intellectual.
Vendor lock-in? compliance and security risks? stupid systems that cost the company an arm and a leg? nobody fucking cares.
Now, depending on an 130 IQ Engineer that basically holds the whole enterprise on his head? Anathema!!!!!!! Bus Factor!!!!
1 reply →
Oh, that's the really fun part. The unprecedented catastrophic event is already happening. Several of them, in fact.
By the time we notice, it'll be too late.
its like slowly boiling the frog
3 replies →
Always messing up some mundane detail!
THIS IS NOT A MUNDANE DETAIL MICHAEL
1 reply →
$1.7-billion isn't a mundane detail Michael!
2 replies →
Clearing LLMs out of our business infrastructure is going to be a massive undertaking. Though I have a tech background, I work in commercial real estate. We are recently seeing new levels of idiocy from the employees, including real estate brokers with zero tech knowledge "coding" solutions to find sites for clients and blindly trusting the output (which I came to find out was complete bullshit), as well as some who have literally stopped communicating with any of their own language - meaning every interaction they have with anyone not in person is made by an LLM. It's a massive threat to our brand and has got to stop. I can't imagine what companies with thousands or tens of thousands of employees who have really been riding the LLM train are going to have to deal with. This thing is more of a virus that exploits human laziness than actual useful tech.
>Clearing LLMs out of our business infrastructure is...n't going to happen.
We've given Moloch a new form, and it ain't going away.
> Clearing LLMs out of our business infrastructure is going to be a massive undertaking.
The asbestos of the future.
1 reply →
Vibes, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that ... I love the smell of Vibes in the morning.
Some day this industry's gonna end.
117 billion us dollars. Eat that GDP of Kuwait! But yes I have never scrambled so hard to try to get on the phone with someone at AWS in my life. Terrifying 10 minutes until I found that banner on the support page. It should be front and center on the dash, not hidden away. And in yellow.
Wow, those price increases due to the RAM and storage shortages AI caused are brutal.
Most likely they also forgot to include "make no mistakes" instructions to their in-house LLM that deploys to production.
Rookie mistake
Current month $13,648,114,178,401.01 188,253,226,212%
Forecasted month end $18,729,381,032,152.4
Apparently my company owes the combined GDP of France, Germany, and UK to AWs.
"Have you considered using Reserved Instances? You could save up to 2 trillion dollars next month. Book a call with your AWS rep."
It was over $500k in the email I got. Not a fun experience. My hands were trembling.
Makes you wonder - what if there really would be an incident where some massive amount of traffic got routed to your infrastructure by some heavyweight player? Say Wikipedia accidentally switches their IP to your CloudFront? Would you really be on the hook for $500k?
Well, even if AWS tried to charge my credit card on file for $500k, it would definitely not go through. Then they’d probably either forgive your bill or just ban you, since I imagine the threshold for taking people to court is fairly high.
In a twisted kind of way, this is an advantage of going to court in the US being SO expensive, even $500k may not be enough to justify it!
Mine was 10 trillion today. At first I thought it was a lot, but then I realized its still smaller than the US national debt, so it cant be that bad.
Scared me even though it was obviously a bug once I stopped to consider the magnitude ($bn). Very unfriendly that they don't allow for hard spend caps; closed my mostly dormant personal account as a result.
If they did allow hard spend caps, it sounds like today would be a global outage.
Well then hopefully next time they'll be a bit more careful when shipping billing code updates!
I have just received a similar alert for $ 5b
AWS on their support data is reporting this:
Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data
Jul 17 3:03 AM PDT We continue to work to resolve the issue affecting estimated cost and usage data displayed in the Billing and Cost Management Console. We have identified the root cause as an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem and we are working on a mitigation. The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges. There are no customer actions required at this time. Once the issue has been mitigated, we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data. We will provide another update by 4:00 AM PDT or sooner if more information becomes available.
Jul 17 2:07 AM PDT Beginning on July 16 7:38 PM PDT, we began displaying incorrect estimated billing data in the Billing and Cost Management Console. Our engineering teams are engaged and investigating root cause. We will provide another update by 3:00 AM PDT or sooner if more information becomes available.
Jul 17 1:33 AM PDT We are investigating issues with Cost Explorer reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data.
One user posted a screenshot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945606 - thanks mirzap!
Wow, $139 B.
After 10 years of building on AWS infra I still had no idea what anything would cost. At some point it just became clear to me that they intentionally designed it this way and that complexity is the feature. I switched to digital ocean last year and really haven't had to think about infrastructure again.
Just a note I thought i'd add, they actually have your estimated next months bill on the upper right hand corner of the page at all times.
Hey man AI makes mistakes sometimes that’s why you need to double check the output.
A guy on the sysadmin subreddit managed to 8x the global GDP https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_...
I liked this comment from that thread :)
> I think you should spin up a whole bunch more instances, and try to cause an integer overflow so they they owe you $978 Trillion.
Several comments here talk about "nearly" having a heart attack. But I wonder: since it's happened to so many people, chances are someone had a heart attack for real. Can they legally be made responsible for that?
Not a lawyer but if you can sue for emotional distress for similar situations I would imagine there is an angle here
When someone says "I nearly had a heart attack," it's _highly_ unlikely that they actually nearly had a heart attack. I don't think the chances are good that anyone actually had a heart attack.
While I agree that this phrase is most commonly spoken in a figurative sense, folks with marginal heart health have a much greater than 0% chance of having something of this nature trigger an actual heart attack.
Stop bragging, The Onion already reported on a one man company who is $1B in debt.
"CEO Reveals How He Used AI To Build One-Person Company That's $1.3 Billion In Debt"
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YERfTT4McsU
Cloud pricing has gotten ridiculous.
Host your own people. Host your own.
The old hypsters have to subsidize the new hypsters.
same here, I am still in shock. took me 10 minutes to find the 'operational issue' message in the dashboard. longest 10 minutes of my life.
Can you not set spending limits in AWS?
No you can't. Spending limits imply realtime billing backend flows and they also imply deleting all your data so that you don't pay for storage.
18 replies →
Not only can you not set limits, even the alarms are not real time. So it is entirely possible to get on the hook for terrifying amounts of money and not know until it's all too late.
No, alerts but not limits.
he did, 140 billion :D
If you owe AWS 140B dollars its their problem ;)
As someone who usually works with data analysis, the distribution of the numbers strikes me as odd. Almost all of them have one number that appears four times, and one or two that appear three times. And overall, there are an unusually small number (0–9) of digits that appear at all.
Maybe it's not just vibe-coded, maybe the numbers themselves are being hallucinated by an LLM.
> Almost all of them have one number that appears four times, and one or two that appear three times
To me that looked suspiciously like string-handling in a weakly typed language.
Like when you do `"100" + 1` in JavaScript, or `int("100" * 2)` in Python.
I've seen my share of such bugs in PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript. In production. Obviously not as simple as the examples, but subtle, like when a library update changed `someFancyLocalStorage.getOrDefault("lastOrder", 100)` by always casting the value to the type of the default (released as patch release). Or where typedEnvGet() should typecast "numbers", but keeps it a string when theres whitespace `AMOUNT_PER_CALL=100\n`. Or where a number passes through a deep stack of middleware and 99.9% of the times remains an int but in rare race conditions becomes a string. etc.
No evidence that's the case here. But from my experience, the repeating and strange formats of numbers hint strongly in that direction.
Pedantic as hell but `"100" * 2` in Python (= `"100100"` for those who don't know) isn't really typing, it's operator overloading. Any language with that could implement the same questionable design decision.
1 reply →
Someone said the numbers are all off by 2^30 because they screwed up and are charging the per GB price for each byte.
It’s probably an artifact of them all being currency multiples of 2^30
Well, for my case, I was paying $0 (Exactly, I managed to hunt down and delete every last resource in my account a few months ago). It was displaying $430 million for me. I don't think that is 0*2^30.
2 replies →
Its the LLMs talking to each other in secret code: random-looking numbers! They've achieved sentience!
Look at them up there, just plotting with each other! :-)
How do we know if our bills were ever right if this made it into production?
That's the neat part, you don't!
Well, they publish unit prices for everything, so you could just get to counting. Whenever I've had to do cost estimates, you estimate how much AWS resources you need and then times that by the unit price.
Just got an alert that we would owe $12 Billion. BILLION. After getting me out of bed and a breathless 15 minutes of investigation, I found: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status#billingconsole_1... which notes this is an ongoing issue on Amazon's Global Billing Console.
Thanks for the heart attack, Amazon!
Cynically I wonder if this has an outcome as an unintentional (or intentional) anchoring exercise for future cost increases
I hope they're not planning for that large of a cost increase.
Someone I know woke up this morning to over 3 trillion dollars.
Love to see how hyperscalers make your life easier and less worrying.
This just hit global news: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/17/amazon-we...
> Amazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitch
> One UK man whose bill is usually less than £1 says he ‘almost had a heart attack’ when he saw £5.8bn invoice
That sucks, some people will get legit panic attacks and worse over this, especially for the smaller, more believable numbers in the 50k-500k range.
Hope they recover and sue for medical bill costs, emotional damage etc.
And like one reddit user suggests, everyone affected should write to their representative about hard billing caps protections
It says a lot about AWS that people believed these estimates were real. Amazon does not have good safeguards to prevent astronomical bills.
If someone gets access to your account they can just buy a 3-year reserved instance u7in-24tb.224xlarge and it will add almost $2m to your bill.
1.5 trillion? Those are rookie numbers.
How about $5,544,640,717,404.09?
That was in my inbox this morning lmao
logged in this morning to find a bill of $595 Billion... heart rate went through the roof... then I noticed the open issue, phew! nice one guys... you got me there...
But with AWS costs rising anyway (not by that much but OK), I'm probably not the only one to start reconsidering their cloud strategy. I think this might have just pushed me over the edge.
Even though it's just a bug, being charged $595B on a platform that is known to cost spike, reminds us that we're not in control of the platform, or our company's expenses.
Even if it was 595 billion, that sounds like their problem.
"If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at yours."
Looks like they set up a LLM to estimate billing?
I was actually in the toilet when I got an email I owe them $36,869,876,146.51. I literally just shit myself.
I got one for 8 billion while I was eating lunch. Thankfully I managed to not vomit.
Ok, back to $0.17 :D
Mine was about the same and evoked a similar response.
I feel much better after seeing the $B estimates here; I only have an estimate of $34M so far
Folks can track it directly on AWS Health: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
It's ok, I owe them 1.22 trillion.
Maybe you went over 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 twice and came back to positive.
Peanuts
Yes, I've got an estimated bill of $4bn. Probably related to the ongoing "Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data" incident?
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
I've had a mysterious Neptune cluster appear on my billing. Never used it, no API key access (or IAM instance profile access, OIDC etc), nothing in my console shows I've ever had one in any region. Raised a case with support, they ignored it.
They have to pay for that AI Capex buildout somehow
Ditto on the heart attack. My cost estimate for the month is currently $223,509,270,216.17. My girlfriend suggested contacting Elon for help. Glad I found this thread. Maybe I should create new keys anyway, this stuff freaks me out.
You know, at one time Amazon was grouped in with all of the other big tech companies as a member of FAANG, as if the company has a culture of solid engineering at its core like Google or Apple.
It doesn't anymore, if it ever did. Read the shareholder letters over the last 5 years like this one (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...). Every day there are stories about back-end things breaking, or AIs overriding attributes or flagging random items as pesticides. The receiving errors at Amazon warehouses are incredible, and take months and multiple support tickets to fix.
> other times it's AWS regions going dark for hours.
They have the best uptime of all major cloud providers.
That’s the smoking gun. Should have used gigabytes instead of bytes. Thank you for pointing me at the issue.
Question: Why does AWS need to roll back estimated bills to a "last known good" state? I get wanting to do that for ACTUAL billing mistakes, but for estimates, they're just that -- approximations. I guess it's fine for predictive purposes to store estimates so they can be compared to actual usage and optimized. But why would AWS bind the values of present estimates to the estimates made earlier in the month. The calculation should always be:
1. Current month's usage * applicable rates; + 2. Estimated future usage for the month * applicable rates.
And Item 1 obviously requires proper data persistence, but Item 2 is just a projection. If they don't have Item 1 correct, AWS's whole system is in question, but I don't think that's the issue. I'm going to guess now -- looking forward to reading the root cause analysis -- that the problem is that someone decided to get too fancy with the estimates, and built a latent requirement that all prior estimates for the month must be available to compute the current estimate. Without estimates working, no estimates are available, and some denominator in an averaging or smoothing or normalizing function goes to 0; then everyone's estimated bill explodes without bound (subject to floating-point arithmetic) resulting in trillion-dollar estimates.
Thats not really how estimates work. The actual metering data is ingested in near real time. The metering * pricing plan is processed within a few hours; thats what youre seeing for “estimated spend” IIRC. The actual billing accumulation is done later, at the end of the cycle, because pricing has cross service discounts, price tranches, credits tied to total spend, etc.
“Rolling back” estimated bills is reprocessing the historic metering data by an older or newer pricing plan version. As i mentioned in another comment someone will have messed up a metering type vale (eg GB/B). Thats why theyll need a few hours to redrive the metering data.
AWS pushed the wishful thinking internal calculator to production.
A couple of relevant links: - AWS Status Page: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status - Reddit Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1uyuaw7/help_my_bill_s...
I wonder what's going on; they still don't have a potential solution after 7 hours and they have multiple teams on it. Never seen anything quite like this
I almost had a heart attack because of this. I was like, did I mess up my API management? Why didn't I just use Lightsail? Those were the thoughts running through my head.
My personal website is on Lightsail, but those alerts started popping up from some test services I had set up while I was studying AI. I swear my heart nearly stopped and I cried. I really think AWS should have spending limits in place.
My bank account barely has enough for next month's rent.
Tale as old as time. When I was coming up it took a $20-40/m investment to get a "dedicated" server that you could start tinkering around on. When you couldn't afford that, you bricked the family PC trying to figure out how to configure your own LAMP stack.
Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.
No not really, nobody has to be using AWS itself per se to be honest, there are still alternatives around.
I mean I own a 7$/yr vps that I pay with crypto and my stack usually involves golang/rust and oh I also self host my mail for temp-mail esque things on that server and I have some other servers floating around as well.
Its just that everyone uses AWS which is the wrong issue here to be honest. If you ask me, aside from the ram pricing caused by AI inflation, things are pretty good. The issue is that not many people know about server providers and other things and default to AWS/Azure etc. because big companies and small companies alike are using them.
Here's a global (interactive) visualization of around ~250 providers, 224 locations and 800 distinct links in 60 countries that I have made if this space interests ya: https://buyvds.net
Hetzner has hard usage cutoffs
AWS revenue for 2025 was $128.7 billion, so I'd say probably a bug.
Double your yearly revenue with this simple trick…
Vendor-locked customers _hate_ him!
Maybe it’s one of those absurd situations where canceling a service doesn’t actually stop the charges. Instead, they quietly begin billing you for some random add-on that was bundled with the original service. You never knew it existed, never knew it had to be canceled separately, and now you’re paying full price for a completely pointless ghost service because the only thing it was tied to has already been canceled.
It sounds ridiculous, but something very similar happened to me with Amazon WorkSpaces. During the WorkSpaces setup, an AWS Active Directory (Directory Service) instance was provisioned as part of the deployment. When I later canceled WorkSpaces, I had no idea the Directory Service had to be deleted separately. I kept getting billed for it, and it ultimately cost more per month than the WorkSpace itself had.
> Anyone else seeing something like this?
You can use the search box at the bottom of every page to search for previous posts.
This was posted an hour before you posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945241
My estimate was over 2T. Talk about waking up quickly...
For science I hope people are trying to figure out now how they could manage to rack up a 2T bill in a month.
My immediate thought was that someone managed to get an access key, stuffed a ton of data in there, and then was doing a ridiculous amount of egress. That was the only way I could conceivably coming up with anywhere near that much cost.
1 reply →
Just got a budget alert that I owe $286,486,223.88 on a hobby aws account, almost got a heart attack.
I generally think AWS is better than GCP and azure, but them not allowing spending caps is a big worry source for me and something that has made me pause and rethink using them. A bad click or a bad actor can create tens of thousands of dollars of spend nearly instantly and they can, and will, bill you for it. I can understand that stopping services is hard but some system would be good. For instance, if they had a two tier system where you could stop new services and active things like EC2 would shut down (but not delete) if spend is > x, that kind of thing. Some sort of 'stop the bleeding' concept would give me a lot of piece of mind using them.
Help, what is this number - US$87,967,679,887,258.36
That's 87 trillion, 967 billion, 679 million, and so on.
If I can expect to be penalized for not paying my legitimate bills, companies should also be penalized for failing to implement common-sense reasonable safeguards that prevent them from slapping their consumers with such absurdities.
Thanks for sharing.
I’m currently dealing with Verizon Wireless and their “Jabronibot” claiming I have a fictional account balance due. It has been sent to collections, but still is being asked for by their legacy system.
The case studies of “Agents in Billing Departments” and potential shareholder lawsuits / E&O claims / reputational damage will be interesting to me. I worked in “risk management” products years ago and this kind of liability is not easily dollar traded away via contract. Will accountability stick to the Decision Makers or will they try to surrogate to the Service Providers? Hmm.
Mine is showing $241,946,798,744.75. I know it will be reverted, but for a brief minute there I suspected someone compromised my account and triggered rust rewrite of everything using thousands of agents via Bedrock :)
Phew.
My alert thresholds are $8 and $10 because I only use aws for some backups to S3. It was reporting my actual spend as $425 billion, and forecast at $777 billion.
I thought it was a bad phishing email first, when I saw it in the console I just laughed. I killed my access keys anyway before I noticed the incident on their status page.
Checked this morning and it's all back to normal.
I'm not sure I've seen anyone with a higher actual / forecast from this. Can anyway top mine?
Yes, an incident is ongoing https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Are you sure it’s a bug ?
The crypto network you hosted should pay for itself in 10-20 years just like LLMs. Don’t worry. Consider Bank of America until then if you are good on credit score.
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Looks like this is a bug w/ S3
""" If you own the bank $1000, thats your problem.
If you owe the bank $1.7B, thats the banks problem. """
What I would be curious about (and I'm sure AWS will never share) is where the incorrect number came from. If the number is somewhat consistent between some groups of accounts, my first guess would be they started summarizing billing across all accounts in whatever cell/grouping/heirarchy AWS architected internally.
Which is just funny.
This generation is too entitled! He should some learn responsibility by paying the full amount; otherwise Amazon should delete his services/data. Consequences!
Thank you so much! I just woke up, and saw budget alert email for a dormant account to use $434,896.90. I haven't gotten so awake so fast in such a long time.
I would not be so relaxed...Your estimate is so low that is likely to be real :-) You should only be relaxed if its in the Trillions...+
I once got a wildly inaccurate billing estimate shortly after I created my AWS account. I could not find a out which resources that would cost me so dearly, and saw no other option to delete the entire account.
A few hours later, I got a mail saying the estimate was wrong.
Now, I cannot create an AWS account using my email address because you cannot create a new account using the same email address…
Should have used Fable.
somewhere a junior dev at AWS just learned their billing dashboard has been off by a factor of a billion and is currently having the worst shower of their career
My guess is that it's because of some vibe-coding stuff! We are using LLMs to write code, validate code and test the code ! What can go wrong ?
From a CFO perspective, this is catastrophic. With monthly billing automatically feeding monthly close pipelines, this would result in results that either need to be adjusted (without proper support) or tank performance until it's fixed on the vendor side. I wouldn't want to be in that situation.
In my 30s, I almost had a heart attack too. I got a notification saying that my cost budget had been increased to one million dollars...
Has anyone received any proactive communication about this? I didn't see the email until about 9 hours after it was sent out, yet I still needed to seek out information as to a) whether this was real or phishing and b) whether the amount was correct.
Seems totally irresponsible not to send an immediate follow up email to make customers aware.
Maybe this is a new strategy to scare people into finally locking down their old, unused AWS accounts. It sure worked for me!
Vibe Billing
At some point my role was to reduce our startup’s AWS bill. I managed to keep 7 figures on our books instead of handing it to AWS. But a message like that would have given me a heart attack in those days.
Long story short: it saved the company from irrelevance. “Well-architected” is for the hyperscalers’ balance sheet, not yours.
I got an email this morning.
> You requested that we alert you when the actual cost associated with your Monthly AWS budget exceeds $2.00 for the current month. The month actual cost associated with this budget is $646,677,805.51.
Current usage: $1.70.
I called it a rounding error and figured it would wash out within a couple of days...
I had a fun day yesterday. Because I had been contacted by AWS about somebody potentially having gained access to my account.
That’s when I logged in. That’s when I saw the 1.3 billion number.
I was pretty fast in getting that backdoor closed and hunting down that leak, I can tell you! :D
I have $13,034.40, while not having used AWS for the last 8 months. Not as much but still crapped my pants
Me too, hello all. I've got 59 Million dollars in billing threshold reached email from AWS. And felt the same as others, and after half an hour of investigation I saw their message on top of the support page. I have 6 mb for static website stores in S3. No other resources.
I got a bill for about R900 for just having a look at some of their services?
I will never use them again, they are huge so probably dont really care about small users
I have actually replaced most of what they do with Raspberry Pi's using cloudflare tunnels
Mines was $190,594,974,587,761.20 :)
Who is going to compensate us for the years taken off our lives when we received the alerts?
You really should get your spending under control. Unfortunately unless you become one of the real people class through a large lottery, it sounds like you owe the rest of your life to AWS until you can pay off your debts for being so careless.
Heard of somebody who got 19 quadrillion dollars - I thought they meant Zimbabwean dollars
one USD is about 362 Zimbabwean dollars. So it would still be about ~53 trillion dollars which is more than the nominal GDP of US and China combined.
For history here, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe redenominated its currency three times in 2006, 2008, and 2009, dropping a total of 25 trailing zeros in the process. the 4th Zimbabwean dollar in 2009 was worth 10^25 of the first zimbabwean dollar.
That would have been a great deal!
My Budget is 10$. The month forecasted cost associated with this budget is $182,278,249,263.06.
Even though I new they could not collect the whole amount, I wondered whether I was hacked. I closed the account, it was an old testing account anyways.
Given the wild but apparently "consistent" numbers I wonder if we could reverse-engineer the wrong algorithm with enough data points? Maybe the proper cost estimate has some relationship to the reported cost estimate.
Just got a call from the IMF president begging me to not default my debt with Amazon and offering me credit line and a plan to re-structure my debt so I don't create a global financial crisis with my default.
If its less than 2 billion is likely to be real :-) I would relax only if its in the trillions ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681
Prompt: bill our aws customers, make no mistakes.
Prompt: investigate new ways to fund additional AI datacenters.
or: Increase revenue!
I mean just overcharging is one approach to achieving that goal I suppose.
But so is imprisoning or exterminating all humans for their own good, as most AI dystopias end up as.
It's a good job it was off by such a large amount, or I might have panicked instead of writing it off as a phishing attempt. I had an email saying my $7.50 budget had been exceeded with an actual cost of $3bn.
Yeah nearly had a heart attack this morning. Thought keys were leaked for a sec.
I seem to have spend >35trilion on rds today, sooo yeah, going great at AWS
If AWS was a predatory mobile gacha game, we'd get 300 apology gems as credit to our accounts for this mixup, to help us in our rolls for the next 3-letter acronym they release.
Do the right thing for the players, Matt!
Glad I saw this. Mine said I racked up $400B yesterday. My usual spend is $15.
I had Hermes managing mine, and it made a partial prepayment to help smooth out the bump in my account balance. Unfortunately Billing Support say my $17.4B refund may take up to 10 calendar days to be processed.
$1.7 billion? That's all? I usually spend around 75 cents a month (migrated off AWS due to it being way too expensive). They emailed me with an estimated bill of $264 billion.
I expect such incidents like this to continue. So please keep vibe coding.
I just deleted my aws account. I don't need these vibes in my life.
I made something that tries to highlight the humor regarding this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950534
Will wait for the RCA, the update says that they will resort to last known estimate as of 15 July. I’m guessing that would imply that the bug is at a lower level, write or an ingestion path.
My first thought was "Oh hell, who left the NAT Gateway on?"
I'd talk to your Amazon rep and see if you can get them to agree to $800 million as a compromise. They are usually pretty good at that stuff.
“Due to a rounding error” or a buffer overflow, you now owe INT_MAX to BaldGuyCloudService.
Yeah, this most certainly is bad code wrapping around a value. AWS will post a notice soon if they haven’t already.
In moments like these I'm reminded of all the people who have committed suicide due to billing errors. This is completely unacceptable. These sorts of errors must _never_ happen.
This is just the cloud area, what if Amazon starts vibe charging regular customers because of some bug? Accounts that are directly linked with regular people's payment methods?
AWS has become the uber employer: before AWS, you just had regular employers steeling employee wages bit by bit by forcing work, skipping breaks, etc.
All hail the new generations of our uberployers.
Same here. Usually $0.15 per month, current bill is $15.4 billion.
I went from 0.03€ to $8B.
Not only did your cost spike, it changed currency and went from postfix to prefix!
I understand people complaining about large bills, but this is over the top!
They should have added "make no mistakes" to the prompt.
It would not make sense for even a 1200 baud dial-up BBS from 1985 to charge by the byte.
In 2026, the gigabyte should probably be the default/minimum unit for something like AWS.
Yes have gotten that before the hundred billion dollar billing alert. Are you ignoring it? Unit error doesn’t do this does it? Maybe they were hir with malware?
I also like the percentual change, that is a lot of comma's.
Obvs have created an urgent AWS support ticket.
I think I would have just waited to see what happened when AWS tried to hit my credit card for $1,700,000,000.
When do you ever get that opportunity?
Three billion dollars sounds about right for a free week of Kiro in the default Agentic mode. We usually see slightly higher numbers, so I wouldn’t be too concerned.
Did it recover for you folks? I still see billions of dollars!
$1.7 billion is small potatoes. My bill is over $155 billion and growing. I'm worried if the trend continues I'll have depleted my rainy day fund.
I was at $5 trillion, on the way to $9 trillion!
Urgent? Not for you. This is like that old joke “If you owe a bank thousands, you have a problem; owe a bank a billion, the bank has a problem”
I’ve just received a budget alert for $25 million! I also created an urgent ticket but haven’t heard back.
That's fine. Like they say when you owe $1m it is your problem but if you owe $100m and can't pay it is the bank's problem.
Wow. As a side effect, this outage is handing Corey Quinn material for the next 4 years of AWS shitposting. No longer is NAT Gateway the prime target.
For anything below a Trillion, you should just take it out petty-cash. </sarc>
My sympathies -- I know I would be overcome with panic in such a situation.
This is the second time I hear about this. I am happy my credit card linked to AWS expired. Just in-case my usual $0.00 ends up 100 million
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681
Aws has created more unicorns than any accelerators.
Just pay it and move on. No need to cause a scene.
AWS billing is inaccurate by $1.7B and my first thought was "maybe I do owe them that much."
I am running a niche SaaS with around 20 users per day on AWS.
I too was shocked when I saw the $1.7billion bill, instead of the usual $1.5billion.
hmm, if these estimates of Amazon profit for the next quarter are correct Bezos is set to become a trillionaire! Take that Musk!!
Total forecasted cost for current month $477,000,039,440.24
Insane
Hope they’re using 64 bits to store these prices
float will have to do it.
In an .md file somewhere:
"NEVER represent currency with floating point, multiply by 100 and store in an int before doing any math"
far out it's 10pm here and I was just about to sleep when my wife nugged me about a billing alert from AWS.
$151 billion the number for me.
yeah.. i just to a daily cost alert.. it was only 23 trillion dollars this month. i thought, hmm seems kind of high this month.
It's okay. They are market leaders. And we use their services cause we can trust that they know what they are doing.
Literal basic fucking math, Amazon.
You don't need hours to recalculate billing. You need to go back to basic algebra.
Anyone using Amazon and dealing with this should be moving away from their services because something this basic going wrong means the correct people are not at the helm of the ship.
>> Literal basic fucking math, Amazon
LLMs are notoriously bad at it...
"If you owe AWS a hundred thousand dollars, that's your problem. If you owe AWS three billion dollars, that's Amazon's problem."
Golden era of software productivity they say
Look how much money AI is making.
We finally found the ROI!
AI doing its "thing". Making billing software work the way it isn't supposed to.
What if the error wasn't so obvious? How many people have been overcharged and never knew?
I'm disappointed I only got a bill for $28M, need to work harder on burning money. Seriously though I thought my life flashed before me
Yeah, small timers, I only got $4,4T. How will I finance this?
MMT!
1 reply →
$28m actually seems worse. If I wake to a $100b bill, that’s obviously a mistake. If I wake up to a bill in the millions then my first thought would be “oh no what did I do wrong, this will ruin my life”
Good news is you finally qualify for Enterprise Support and you've never been closer to a Series B.
Lol, Friday deployment is a bad omen even with LLM. Some things are just unchangeable facts of life.
Well, no coffee needed this morning.
$103,515,940,301.79
The panic was real. We read about keys getting stolen all the time. Was about to nuke my set up too.
I got 109 billion - am I the winner?
Depends. Did you also get a free heart attack?
This is real risk. Someone could really have a serious health problem.
Sorry mate, $241,946,798,744.75 for Glacier here.
Got a message that I owe 37 million on an account that I haven't used in probably...6 years?
Vibe coded fix, resulted in many having multi billion bills. Claude really did it this time.
Looks like you are the biggest shareholder. Well, going by the popular saying: “You own AWS now”.
And to think the federal government claims inflation is in the single digits this year!
This is a strong argument to either self host or work really hard to be cloud agnostic.
Is it even possible to audit the cloud pricing? They just give us a number and we pay.
On AWS, you can enable CUR (cost and usage reporting) and get detailed, line-item billing figures that you can audit.
And naturally, companies like Cloudability [now Apptio] and others have sprung up to do parts of this for you [at a fee, of course...]
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/what-is-cur...
I'm sure other cloud vendors have similar functionality (because they need this on the back end to do their own billing anyway).
Some guy named Claude screwed up.
$44 trillion over here, at least our bill was so outrageously high that I just laughed
This is just Anthropic reaching out to their customers for help with their AWS bill.
I just invested ALL my money into AMZN cause next earnings report will be FIRE :)
The charge-back penalties are going to be hilarious and hopefully bankrupting.
Does the affiliate program still work for AWS? When do I get my referral fee?
Aw man I was hoping to punk my manager but our cost estimates are unaffected.
Our alert was for exceeding $300...by several hundred billion dollars.
You're not working hard enough if your AWS bill isn't $1.7B.
I think I know how Bezos plans to pay for his Billion dollar AI costs.
FinSlops.
So long as customers are good for it, AWS is about to crush earnings!
I guess on the plus side I'm $1.7B better off so I can retire...
Yea, same here. $420M+ bill, when we have <10$ per month usually.
Only 1.7? I got $55B up from 41 cents.
I literally almost had a heart attack today.
Who else had LinkedIn posts about this flashing before your eyes?
Seems like a scam. Call your CC company and issue a chargeback :p
What an `effin disaster. The alert almost gave me a heart attack.
The market *hates* this one weird trick to juice earnings
Our org account's bill is showing up as > 100 trillion.
You've got to grab a screenshot of that.
Curious if it's just s3 costs or other services as well?
for me it was s3 cost only
Is AWS in their "move fast and break things" era ?
Lumber along and smash stuff
The new data centers are more expensive:
ACTUAL Amount: $1,046,294,123,330.95
Nothing like generational debt to kick off a Friday morning
This is generational debt for a Kardashev Type III civilization. If there are individuals who are being charged "the whole of the GDP the human race has ever produced", then Amazon is claiming the rest of the world owes them a fairly significant portion of the galaxy if you consider the entire billing claims being made here.
There have been some big billing errors in the past but I wouldn't be surprised this is a new record. I know I've seen people charged around 92 quadrillion, which is a rounding error from underflowing a signed 64-bit integer with pennies, but those stories are usually isolated individuals. It sounds like the aggregate error here may comfortably exceed that. Hard to tell how widespread this is; as a data point my ~$2.00/month spend on S3 seems to still be billing correctly, so it must not be affecting everyone. But a few trillion here and a few trillion there and you get up to those quadrillions pretty quick.
$627,487,837,871.49
I might be a winner.
Yes seeing the same, so far no response from AWS support
I almost got a heart attack seeing a bill for 48B USD!
Go turn off autopay now! For personal accounts anyway
Lucky. I’m on the hook for 54 billion (and change).
To be exactly that guy:
This cannot happen if you do not do this renting at variable rates.
A thing you own doesn't suddenly bill you trillions of dollars in error. It doesn't hyperscale either, but neither do you.
Funny how these errors always go one direction.
Results of vibe coding and vibe configurations.
Just pay it and then deal with support via a ticket.
;)
> $5,544,640,717,404.09
This is what we received this morning
Our S3 bill for a single day was $48 trillion
$250 billion. Nearly died right then and there
Amazon, the first quadrillion-dollar company.
Have even seen a $9.2 trillion for a friend.
do you see cost ever day for the month of July or just the last day? I also have billions of dollars in cost explorer
now it is fixed for me as well. issue is still open in aws health center though
THis is why I hate API/usage pricing
Yes I received an 2.8m USD budget alert.
someones been dognfooding the AI too muxh
at $1.7 billion, that unit conversion error is now the most expensive TODO comment in software history
it seems like these types of problems have gained frequency in the ai era, or is it just recency bias?
Need some money for a new Launchpad
It looks like AI is completely done.
I hope you have auto pay disabled
Just got mine. $534,366,582,647.75
Shocking! That seventy five cents is suspicious.
This is just embarrassing.
How much is that in kidneys?
A lot.
Just pay your bill Elon.
storage, compute cost is increasing AWS be like lets increase prices
vibe coding for the win.
I prefer to just pay...
a billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up
VibeBilling, love it
this counts towards ARR right? would be stupid not to
yeah the AI read billionaring instead of billing
131 billion for me
aws becoming first quadrillion dollars company
Test is king!
Mine was a mere $49B. Fucking idiots.
Cheap!
did it recover for you? I still see billions
Mine has
thx, when? Was it only last day or the whole month of July was inflated?
My personal photo backup S3 account, with a budget limit of $10, now going to cost me ....
$1,299,988,247,332.56!
That was a fun set of emails to wake up to, figured they had to be phishing for how outrageous of a number it was. But nope! Fun little incident they've got going over there.
AMZN Q2 numbers are in, and it turns out they're going to Goldman Sachs the AI bubble.
Maybe they accidentally used the Argentine peso ;)
Less hyper-scaler, more hyper-inflation
The latest status update says things will be back to normal for everyone on the 19th.
This spells for me a busy on-call and work over the weekend.
It sucks!
You think there will be lessons learnt from mistakes?
Not a fucking chance! Business as usual come monday!
Imagine it not being a bug...
As the famous saying goes: If you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem.
Time to become a shepherd in some remote mountains.
Surprise hyperinflation. Check the breadshelves!
And them, ... actually not an error. Server costs went up with AI needs, you know. The AWS incident is about inaccuracy, not "absurd values".
You gotta catch-up or die.
I saw another post on reddit with something like a hundred trillion dollar bill. I wish I had saved that link to share it, the comments were quite comical!
Wild.
Rife.
Same, i am now a slave to Jeff Bezos to the end of my life.
brb, off to buy some AMZN
Imagine the chaos if, as people sometimes suggest should happen, AWS shut down running instances in accounts that exceeded a billing threshold..
I got estimated costs of $56.something billions. Usually ~$100/month. My heart rate currently still sits at around 160 bpm. Motherfuckers.
What’s the over under for this being another AI-fueled engineering screw up for AWS?
File a GDPR request to have your account deleted.
Then flee the country just to be sure.
invoicemaxxing
I mean 3 billion USD is clearly too big to fail, so I wouldn't worry too much
Fast and loose with billing data. Welcome to the new Amazon.
Uhh class action incoming? $34,909,930,575.09 over here.
I hope they send out some free credits at least. I imagine quite a few people got a real fucking scare today. They haven't even sent out any corrections yet.
This is probably going to push me to completely close a couple of AWS accounts I setup when doing training courses so I could get certified (mandatory requirement from my work).
I'm not currently running anything and have no plans to at the moment. I've always had a mild dread that I'll suddenly get a bill for more than $0.00.
If AWS can goof in a way that causes obviously massive bills (like today), what's to say they can't goof in more subtle ways and start charging small additional amounts that many people may not notice and just pay it.
1 reply →
What would your damages be? They’re not actually going to charge your credit card for 34 billion.
I could see someone sadly taking their own life over this.
I mean, emotional damages are a thing right?
2 replies →
You didn't have savings opportunities enabled
Rookie error
Pff rookie numbers, mine was 375 billion.
Small potato's sir, my bill > GDP of Switzerland. A cool $1.2T
I was at $5 trillion, on the way to $9 trillion.
eh your typical off-by-7 (zeros) programmer mistake
I blame A.I. usage
Yeah pretty much, must have been vibecoded.
you too with Fable huh?
[dead]
Wow, so true! Domain expertise is apparently not a requirement. At all. Wow.
Of course not, domain expertise is expensive no matter what the field is, and to the big companies like Amazon the whole point of GenAI is to get rid of those pesky expensive humans and replace them with cheaper humans.
[dead]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
In unrelated news I just hit my target for S3 revenue (projections). Promotion meeting locked in for tomorrow (fastest in the companies history), looking forward to being a L2 Amazon employee.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
Clearly they weren't tokenmaxxing hard enough or weren't using the latest models /s.
What an absolute joke. All just so that line goes up. As if their fees weren't high enough vs. alternatives (especially egress). And I'm sure the pro-AI crowd will keep saying we're luddites for not loving this clearly revolutionary and disruptive tech.
Don't worry. With so much debt banks start to treat you with respect. /S
Honestly, I would worry more about estimated billing that seems plausible in general, but is way to high for you personally. These ridiculous amounts? Not so much.
I got freaked out by the mere fact that I got a billing alert, since getting one would require my monthly spend to have suddenly exploded.
[dead]
Of course, this is only considered an error if the account is unable to pay. /s
[dead]
[flagged]