Compute & Cloud
Amazon fixes AWS billing bug that showed some customers owing billions
Amazon is working to fix a bug in its AWS billing portal that showed some cloud customers owing millions or billions of dollars for services they never used, including one estimate near $2.5 billion, though the company says the figures don't reflect actual usage or charges.
Some Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers woke up Friday to billing estimates showing they owed massive, inaccurate sums for cloud computing they hadn’t used. Amazon confirmed Friday it is trying to resolve the bug in the AWS billing portal, which the company traced to its billing computation subsystem.
According to an update on Amazon’s status page, the company began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. By Friday morning, Amazon conceded that a rollback of a recent change had not resolved the issue.
Screenshots posted by AWS customers on Reddit showed the scale of the errors: one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for the month’s AWS usage, while others reported similar alerts ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
The good news for affected customers is that they are likely off the hook — Amazon said the billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges.” When TechCrunch reached Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson by email, she referred the outlet to the company’s status page and did not comment further, including on whether any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused as a result of the issue.
As of Friday, Amazon’s status page indicated the issue was expected to last several more hours.
Why it matters
A billing subsystem bug that can generate billion-dollar phantom invoices underscores how much of the world’s cloud infrastructure — and the trust customers place in its billing accuracy — runs through a small number of providers like AWS.