AWS billing glitch hits customers with $1 billion in fees

glitch with Amazon Web Services’ billing has led some customers to believe they owe the world’s fifth-most valuable company billions of dollars. Ooops!

Bill Radgowski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, was one of the customers affected. This morning, he woke up to dissonance Email AWS alert: He’s taken in more than $1.5 billion in usage fees, and his August 1 bill was on track to be more than $3 billion.

“I’ve had this account for over 6 years, and in that time my monthly spending has never exceeded $0.02,” Radgowski tells WIRED. He shared screenshots of his three most recent monthly invoices from AWS. They each came out to $0.01.

And based on responses to the AWS support account on X, Radjewski is not alone. Others have received similar shocking quotes: 22 billion dollars; 75 billion dollars; 110 billion dollars. “Idiot, why did you hit me with $5 million, what did you even do,” one user wrote books. “Please explain man, my heart is going to explode.”

When reached for comment, Amazon spokeswoman Aisha Johnson referred WIRED to: AWS Service Health Dashboard. Although it’s not clear exactly how many customers are affected, the control panel described the issue as “global.”

The dashboard also reported that the billing console “began displaying incorrect estimated billing data” on Thursday, July 16 at 10:38 PM ET.

The company began investigating the issue about six hours later, according to the dashboard, and concluded that the “root cause” of the error was “an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing calculation subsystem.” It did not specify what the problem was.

In subsequent updates, AWS said it was “rolling back a recent change to the billing calculation subsystem,” and said it was trying to revert to the “last known good estimate bill calculation.” It also said it had “temporarily suspended estimated billing calculations.”

The issue should be resolved by the end of this week, and “no customer action is required at this time,” the company wrote.

Eventually, some customers decided to publish through it.

One Reddit user posted a Screenshot From their current “Cost and Usage Overview” to the AWS subreddit, which showed they’ve incurred $7.1 trillion in service fees since July 1 — more than double Amazon’s market cap.