AWS billing glitch sends cloud customer estimates into the trillions
The tech giant confirms the astronomical figures are display errors resulting from incorrect unit pricing, with no actual charges incurred.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is addressing a significant software fault within its billing portal that has generated inaccurate usage estimates for some of its cloud computing clients. The issue, which began late Thursday evening, caused certain accounts to display billing figures in the millions or billions of dollars for services that had not been utilised. The discrepancy came to light after customers reported logging on to find startling bill estimates, with screenshots shared on social media platform Reddit showing the scale of the error.
One Reddit user reported a billing estimate of $4.2 trillion for their account, while another user noted a half-billion-dollar forecast for two S3 buckets containing only a few megabytes of data. The discrepancy was highlighted by screenshots shared on Reddit, showing estimates ranging from a few million to hundreds of millions of dollars. Some customers panicked and deleted data or took other drastic measures before realising the figures were erroneous.
Amazon clarified that these figures are merely display errors and do not reflect actual usage or charges. An AWS spokesperson stated that the displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges. The AWS Service Health Dashboard states that the problem stemmed from incorrect unit pricing in its estimated billing computation system.
At the time of publication, Amazon was still working on a fix. In the meantime, the company has paused estimated billing updates and is reverting its system to the most recent accurate billing data. It expects the process to take several hours. AWS will continue to update customers via the dashboard.
"There are no customer actions required at this time," it said. That's a relief for the affected customers, but not before many dealt with serious anxiety. The exact number of affected customers is not specified in the source material, and the precise duration of the outage beyond "several hours" remains uncertain at the time of publication.
