alt Hacker NewsAsk HN: Any AWS billing issues known? Amazon forecast of 3 billion dollars
I receive an AWS Budgets alert that my budget is exceeding the alert threshold. Threshold is 5$. Forecasted amount is listed as $3,005,575,870.47. (Yepp, right, that’s 3 billion dollars.) I haven't even used AWS actively in the last year, but AWS console lists the amount as stated above. No feedback from AWS support yet, but the support AI chat bot says: "Die perfekt gleichmäßigen Tageskosten seit dem 1. Juli deuten stark auf einen Abrechnungs- oder Messfehler hin." ("The perfectly consistent daily costs since July 1 strongly suggest a billing or metering error.") Bot created a support ticket (or at least told me so). Anyone else seeing something like this? Already disabled all AWS IAM roles and deleted all other AWS resources I know of. AWS login not hacked as far as I can tell. But owing Amazon 3 billion dollars is a bit of a concern. Any ideas?
Comments
From their status page
>The second path involves rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem.
Want to bet AI code was involved?
Woke up to a 100 billion dollars in S3, which is above the USD 4 alarm threshold I had set (I pay $0.55 monthly) . Some AI decided to prune the most impressionable of us.
You folks are completely irresponsible with your finances. I only spent $2.4 million last night. You've got to learn to manage your money.
My estimate was only $21M (vs ~$0.01 average bill). Wish I had checked status sooner and saved myself the panic!
My process went: verify email is not phishing (it was), login to console and check dashboard (same amount), attempt to understand cost (cost management kept contradicting itself), try to log support ticket and only on that part did I notice the status notification. At least I can breathe again now!
Several comments here talk about "nearly" having a heart attack. But I wonder: since it's happened to so many people, chances are someone had a heart attack for real. Can they legally be made responsible for that?
Someone I know woke up this morning to over 3 trillion dollars.
Love to see how hyperscalers make your life easier and less worrying.
Scared me even though it was obviously a bug once I stopped to consider the magnitude ($bn). Very unfriendly that they don't allow for hard spend caps; closed my mostly dormant personal account as a result.
@dang could you merge these threads?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945233
OT: $286 million for me, almost had a heart attack
Thank you so much! I just woke up, and saw budget alert email for a dormant account to use $434,896.90. I haven't gotten so awake so fast in such a long time.
Hey man AI makes mistakes sometimes that’s why you need to double check the output.
Ditto on the heart attack. My cost estimate for the month is currently $223,509,270,216.17. My girlfriend suggested contacting Elon for help. Glad I found this thread. Maybe I should create new keys anyway, this stuff freaks me out.
If I can expect to be penalized for not paying my legitimate bills, companies should also be penalized for failing to implement common-sense reasonable safeguards that prevent them from slapping their consumers with such absurdities.
At some point my role was to reduce our startup’s AWS bill. I managed to keep 7 figures on our books instead of handing it to AWS. But a message like that would have given me a heart attack in those days.
Long story short: it saved the company from irrelevance. “Well-architected” is for the hyperscalers’ balance sheet, not yours.
Yeah nearly had a heart attack this morning. Thought keys were leaked for a sec.
My estimate was over 2T. Talk about waking up quickly...
I have just received a similar alert for $ 5b
AWS on their support data is reporting this:
Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data
Jul 17 3:03 AM PDT We continue to work to resolve the issue affecting estimated cost and usage data displayed in the Billing and Cost Management Console. We have identified the root cause as an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem and we are working on a mitigation. The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges. There are no customer actions required at this time. Once the issue has been mitigated, we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data. We will provide another update by 4:00 AM PDT or sooner if more information becomes available.
Jul 17 2:07 AM PDT Beginning on July 16 7:38 PM PDT, we began displaying incorrect estimated billing data in the Billing and Cost Management Console. Our engineering teams are engaged and investigating root cause. We will provide another update by 3:00 AM PDT or sooner if more information becomes available.
Jul 17 1:33 AM PDT We are investigating issues with Cost Explorer reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data.
Who is going to compensate us for the years taken off our lives when we received the alerts?
I've had a mysterious Neptune cluster appear on my billing. Never used it, no API key access (or IAM instance profile access, OIDC etc), nothing in my console shows I've ever had one in any region. Raised a case with support, they ignored it.
Vibe Billing
Three billion dollars sounds about right for a free week of Kiro in the default Agentic mode. We usually see slightly higher numbers, so I wouldn’t be too concerned.
They should have added "make no mistakes" to the prompt.
Got a message that I owe 37 million on an account that I haven't used in probably...6 years?
I almost had a heart attack because of this. I was like, did I mess up my API management? Why didn't I just use Lightsail? Those were the thoughts running through my head.
My personal website is on Lightsail, but those alerts started popping up from some test services I had set up while I was studying AI. I swear my heart nearly stopped and I cried. I really think AWS should have spending limits in place.
My bank account barely has enough for next month's rent.
"If you owe AWS a hundred thousand dollars, that's your problem. If you owe AWS three billion dollars, that's Amazon's problem."
Heard of somebody who got 19 quadrillion dollars - I thought they meant Zimbabwean dollars
far out it's 10pm here and I was just about to sleep when my wife nugged me about a billing alert from AWS.
$151 billion the number for me.
Mines was $190,594,974,587,761.20 :)
Did it recover for you folks? I still see billions of dollars!
131 billion for me
Literal basic fucking math, Amazon.
You don't need hours to recalculate billing. You need to go back to basic algebra.
Anyone using Amazon and dealing with this should be moving away from their services because something this basic going wrong means the correct people are not at the helm of the ship.
[dead]
Woke up to a billing alarm email. Thought I had leaked my AWS keys accidentally and somehow run up 437 billion dollars of charges. Joke's on them though, I don't have 437 billion dollars
Anyways I didn't need coffee. That produced an adrenaline release unlike any I've experienced before. Thanks AWS