alt Hacker NewsAWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
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...
Comments
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.
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.
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!
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.
If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $1.7 billion, that's the bank's problem.
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...
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….
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe they're using too many humans and not enough AI in their software development. That must be it.
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.
Wow, those price increases due to the RAM and storage shortages AI caused are brutal.
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
"Operational issue - AWS Billing Console (Global) Service - AWS Billing Console Severity Impacted - Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data"
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.
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"
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.
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.
A guy on the sysadmin subreddit managed to 8x the global GDP https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_...
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?
Cloud pricing has gotten ridiculous.
Host your own people. Host your own.
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.
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
That’s the smoking gun. Should have used gigabytes instead of bytes. Thank you for pointing me at the issue.
Cynically I wonder if this has an outcome as an unintentional (or intentional) anchoring exercise for future cost increases
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.
How do we know if our bills were ever right if this made it into production?
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.
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
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
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?
Good news is you finally qualify for Enterprise Support and you've never been closer to a Series B.
Looks like they set up a LLM to estimate billing?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Need some money for a new Launchpad
They have to pay for that AI Capex buildout somehow
Yes, I've got an estimated bill of $4bn. Probably related to the ongoing "Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data" incident?
I made something that tries to highlight the humor regarding this:
I was actually in the toilet when I got an email I owe them $36,869,876,146.51. I literally just shit myself.
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.
THis is why I hate API/usage pricing
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.