Amazon fixing bug that billed some AWS customers billions of dollars
Amazon acknowledged a bug in its AWS billing portal that showed some customers owed millions or billions for unused services, assuring them the estimates are inaccurate.
Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used. Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.
The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said. According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment. The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page.
