AWS billing glitch displays false billions-dollar charges for cloud customers
Customers logged on to see estimates ranging from millions to $2.5 billion, prompting an ongoing investigation into a recent system change that a rollback failed to fix.
Amazon Web Services is addressing a significant software fault within its billing portal that has generated inaccurate usage estimates for some of its cloud computing clients. The company confirmed on Friday that the issue, which began late Thursday, caused certain accounts to display billing figures in the millions or billions of dollars for services that had not been utilised.
According to an update on its status page, the error stems from a bug in the billing computation subsystem. Amazon stated that the displayed figures do not reflect actual usage or charges, effectively clearing customers of any financial liability for the inflated amounts. The tech giant noted that a rollback of a recent change was attempted to resolve the problem but did not fix the issue.
The discrepancy came to light after customers reported logging on to find startling bill estimates. Screenshots shared on social media platform Reddit showed the scale of the error, with one customer quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for the month. Other users reported alerts ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Amazon clarified that these figures are merely display errors resulting from the software bug and do not represent actual debts owed by customers. Despite the reassurance, the company acknowledged that the problem persists and is expected to last for several more hours while engineers work to identify the root cause of the malfunction triggered by the recent system update.
The exact scope of the bug and the total number of affected customers remains unclear. A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately return a request for further comment regarding the technical specifics of the failure or the timeline for a full resolution.
