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AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
URL already posted: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status 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_skyrocketed_from_around_5_cents_per/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1uyuaw7/help_my_bill_s...
- balintpeter 3mo agoYea, same here. $420M+ bill, when we have <10$ per month usually.
- ninjin-carh 3mo agoI got 109 billion - am I the winner?
- nprateem 3mo agoDepends. Did you also get a free heart attack?
- kubelsmieci 3mo agoThis is real risk. Someone could really have a serious health problem.
- princetman 3mo agoSorry mate, $241,946,798,744.75 for Glacier here.
- meraku 3mo agoSame here. Usually $0.15 per month, current bill is $15.4 billion.
- AegirLeet 3mo agoMaybe this is a new strategy to scare people into finally locking down their old, unused AWS accounts. It sure worked for me!
- dgrin91 3mo agoMine 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.
- th3o6a1d 3mo ago131 billion for me
- rucury 3mo agoUhh class action incoming? $34,909,930,575.09 over here.
- Hamuko 3mo agoI hope they send out some free credits at least. I imagine quite a few people got a real fucking scare today. They haven't even sent out any corrections yet.
- fian 3mo agoThis is probably going to push me to completely close a couple of AWS accounts I setup when doing training courses so I could get certified (mandatory requirement from my work). I'm not currently running anything and have no plans to at the moment. I've always had a mild dread that I'll suddenly get a bill for more than $0.00. If AWS can goof in a way that causes obviously massive bills (like today), what's to say they can't goof in more subtle ways and start charging small additional amounts that many people may not notice and just pay it.
- nullorempty 3mo agoExcellent point! I remember seeing a story shared by AMS RDS on linked-in that basically said... "Now with predictable pricing" Huh?
- akerl_ 3mo agoWhat would your damages be? They’re not actually going to charge your credit card for 34 billion.
- zcemycl 3mo agoAws has created more unicorns than any accelerators.
- andystanton 3mo agoA couple of relevant links: - AWS Status Page: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status - Reddit Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1uyuaw7/help_my_bill_skyrocketed_from_around_5_cents_per/ https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1uyuaw7/help_my_bill_s...
- csunbird 3mo agoJust got a budget alert that I owe $286,486,223.88 on a hobby aws account, almost got a heart attack.
- mlitwiniuk 3mo agoI was actually in the toilet when I got an email I owe them $36,869,876,146.51. I literally just shit myself.
- andystanton 3mo agoMine was about the same and evoked a similar response.
- Hamuko 3mo agoI got one for 8 billion while I was eating lunch. Thankfully I managed to not vomit.
- mlitwiniuk 3mo agoOk, back to $0.17 :D
- pqvst 3mo agoProbably 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.
- zengineer 3mo agoSame - just had some malicious bots running through my platform last week and really thought they found a security hole after all. Even though the amount sounded ridicoulus, I got quite nervous and a very bad feeling when I logged-in AWS and saw that price.
- krawat3 3mo agoSame here. I got an email with a bill of $233 million and an estimated $433 million until the end of the month. I panicked and nuked my entire setup (which wasn't used that much, anyway, the alert threshold was $1) - I really wonder how many people did the same. It's been 2 hours and I still haven't fully calmed down.
- aareet 3mo agoI did the same! I was trembling all day!
- gomid 3mo agoSame. Cold sweat for about 20 minutes. Even though I saw the service health notification, I still spent the last hour trying to find where my storage spiked. In any case, I'll be tearing down plenty of stale infra after this!
- saghm 3mo agoThe should pass a law saying they should have to pay you the amount over the correct bill as compensation; I bet they'll stop making mistakes like this pretty quickly after that
- everforward 3mo agoYeah, this one is bad because it’s off by so much I’m shocked it wasn’t caught by tests, alerts about unusual changes in the billing system, or even accounting. Like surely the P&L reports look all kinds of wrong right now, they have to be showing like 6M% profit margins and revenue measured in quadrillions. I’m also a little surprised this didn’t trip a circuit breaker. For something as non-real-time as billing, I’m surprised they don’t have an automated kill switch that pauses the billing system and fires a page if variance in bills spikes. Naively some kind of “if the standard deviation of customer bills for this year changes by more than 50%, pause the billing system”. At that number of customers, those numbers should be pretty stable beyond internal billing changes they could normalize for.
- princetman 3mo agoMine is showing $241,946,798,744.75. I know it will be reverted, but for a brief minute there I suspected someone compromised my account and triggered rust rewrite of everything using thousands of agents via Bedrock :) Phew.
- tlovage 3mo agoI got estimated costs of $56.something billions. Usually ~$100/month. My heart rate currently still sits at around 160 bpm. Motherfuckers.
- rvz 3mo agoI expect such incidents like this to continue. So please keep vibe coding.
- lukaslueg 3mo agoApparently what used to be `GB of storage consumed` is confused with `Bytes of storage consumed`, leading to a cool off by 2*30 error. > You're right to question my calculation. The MCP server failed to connect when I tried to look up the field definition. I guessed instead of validating. This is on me. But look at all the revenue!
- stefan_ 3mo agoVibecoded the billing system, raised revenue 9000%. Great for that promo package.
- leugim 3mo agoOh great so 2*30=60 he only owes 28.3$ million... hehe I guess you wanted to say 2^30 which makes 1.5$
- hansvm 3mo agoMy hunch is the HN formatter swallowed the double asterisk typical of python exponents. While we're being pedantic, 2^30 is 28 in normal programming languages ;)
- tomjakubowski 3mo agoBut 2^30 is 28.
- raverbashing 3mo agoAI slop. Or just a distracted dev
- root-parent 3mo ago>> Or just a distracted dev And a distracted tester? And a distracted pipeline of regression tests? No, the truth is way worst...
- silon42 3mo ago
- akerl_ 3mo agohttps://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status Looks like this is a bug w/ S3
- realizer 3mo ago$627,487,837,871.49 I might be a winner.
- iamrik9 3mo agoI 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 https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
- paulddraper 3mo agoPeanuts
- bfjvibybd6cuvu6 3mo agoIt's ok, I owe them 1.22 trillion.
- consp 3mo agoMaybe you went over 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 twice and came back to positive.
- TekMol 3mo agoIt 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?
- Hamuko 3mo agoWell, even if AWS tried to charge my credit card on file for $500k, it would definitely not go through. Then they’d probably either forgive your bill or just ban you, since I imagine the threshold for taking people to court is fairly high.
- tatjam 3mo agoIn a twisted kind of way, this is an advantage of going to court in the US being SO expensive, even $500k may not be enough to justify it!
- philipallstar 3mo agoMaybe they're using too many humans and not enough AI in their software development. That must be it.
- the_real_cher 3mo agoThe code base is not gigantic enough they need AI to generate massively more lines of code.
- rwmj 3mo agoBut they're going to try anyway.
- marcosdumay 3mo agoMy guess is the GP swallowed a comma.
- the_real_cher 3mo agoYour right! My misteak!
- paulddraper 3mo agoWell AWS never had bugs before.
- egeozcan 3mo agoThey need the customers to pay more so they can fix the bugs. It's self-correcting.
- cmollis 3mo agoyeah.. i just to a daily cost alert.. it was only 23 trillion dollars this month. i thought, hmm seems kind of high this month.
- endless_smash 3mo ago[dead]
- pcarmichael 3mo agohttps://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status "Operational issue - AWS Billing Console (Global) Service - AWS Billing Console Severity Impacted - Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data"
- Polizeiposaune 3mo agoUpdate as of 7:53am PDT: "The rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue and we are continuing to investigate multiple mitigation paths. Estimated bill updates remain paused."
- masafej536 3mo ago>Estimated bill updates remain paused Wait what if someones actually getting usage spiked
- vntok 3mo agoHackers rejoice!
- Sheepzez 3mo agoYes, I've got an estimated bill of $4bn. Probably related to the ongoing "Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data" incident? https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
- cifvts 3mo agoYes, an incident is ongoing https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
- cyanydeez 3mo agoAWS has become the uber employer: before AWS, you just had regular employers steeling employee wages bit by bit by forcing work, skipping breaks, etc. All hail the new generations of our uberployers.
- marksk 3mo agologged 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.
- sshine 3mo agoEven though it's just a bug, being charged $595B on a platform that is known to cost spike, reminds us that we're not in control of the platform, or our company's expenses.
- fullstop 3mo agoEven if it was 595 billion, that sounds like their problem. "If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at yours."
- im-broke 3mo agoHelp, what is this number - US$87,967,679,887,258.36
- sshine 3mo agoThat's 87 trillion, 967 billion, 679 million, and so on.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jwik 3mo agoYes, there is a known issue with cost estimation. https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
- mstolpm 3mo agoThank you. Have seen this after I posted.
- coffee_is_nom 3mo agoThanks, I panicked logged in and could not find the root cause of the bill. Thanks AWS, no caffeine needed this morning!
- mysterydip 3mo agoBit of an understatement: “The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges.”
- Xunjin 3mo ago"There are no customer actions required at this time." Of course, you provided heart stress failure tests for free.
- AngryKitten 3mo agoWhatever you do, AWS, don't post a related service health alert site wide on the console. Heck, don't even post one in the billing module. We wouldn't want to overdo the alerts, especially when we already have one being displayed to market the new FinOps Agent in Public Preview.
- fuorilegge 3mo agoI 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.
- GuestFAUniverse 3mo agoDon't worry. With so much debt banks start to treat you with respect. /S Honestly, I would worry more about estimated billing that seems plausible in general, but is way to high for you personally. These ridiculous amounts? Not so much.
- Hamuko 3mo agoI got freaked out by the mere fact that I got a billing alert, since getting one would require my monthly spend to have suddenly exploded.
- josefdlange 3mo agoWell, no coffee needed this morning. $103,515,940,301.79
- sscaryterry 3mo agoVibe coding billing systems is a top-notch idea :)
- ainiriand 3mo agoHey what do you think about vibe coding weapon systems? Do you want to be my cofounder?
- sscaryterry 3mo agoSure! What could possibly go wrong?
- chairmansteve 3mo agoDrones are already vibe targeting in Ukraine/Russia.
- nonameiguess 3mo agoI don't want to say this was ever or will ever be a good idea, but the reality of warfare is a lot of the time dudes were just running into an alley and firing off mortars without trying to look or think of what they were shooting at anyway. I doubt the Taliban gave a shit about false positive rates when they were cutting the hands off of anyone who voted. They got the point across either way.
- lenkite 3mo agoUS Navy now doesn't care either. Using Palantir's Maven Smart System, which incorporated Anthropic's Claude AI model, to identify and evaluate targets - which blew up the girls elementary school in Minab. Use AI => No War Crimes!
- mxuribe 3mo agoWe retro-fitted a Terminator T100 model with the brain of the latest LLM models, and then gave'em 2 shotguns...and, you'll never guess what happened next! Well, actually i guess you can guess what happens next! lol :-D
- ruddct 3mo agoIf you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $1.7 billion, that's the bank's problem.
- sajithdilshan 3mo agoNot if you’re Elon Musk
- michelb 3mo agoElon Musk is everyone's problem
- focusgroup0 3mo ago[dead]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- hahahaa 3mo agoNot because of his net worth (he is probably worth 200bn if it came to liquidating) but because he will pull some trick to get the money. Maybe he will chuck SpaceX under debt, draw a dividend then set up a 1000 year payment plan with the bank.
- danlitt 3mo agoThis joke only works if you actually impose a cost on AWS of 1.7 billion. If they just serve you a bill for no reason, it's still your problem.
- fatnoah 3mo agoI saw this in action on a smaller scale. In a past job, my wife organized events for a decent sized company. After an event, she'd typically have a $300k+ balance on her corporate Amex. When she went on maternity leave, the person filling in for her job neglected to actually pay the bills, so when she returned there were quite a few emails and voicemails from Amex regarding the over $500k balance. The messages started as polite and eventually started to get more desperate in tone. At no point were they threatening or adversarial.
- dv_dt 3mo agoCynically I wonder if this has an outcome as an unintentional (or intentional) anchoring exercise for future cost increases
- ardacinar 3mo agoI hope they're not planning for that large of a cost increase.
- lsdafjasd 3mo agoI have $13,034.40, while not having used AWS for the last 8 months. Not as much but still crapped my pants
- mrtksn 3mo agoWow, those price increases due to the RAM and storage shortages AI caused are brutal.
- hokkos 3mo agoSame, i am now a slave to Jeff Bezos to the end of my life.
- wewewedxfgdf 3mo agoCloud pricing has gotten ridiculous. Host your own people. Host your own.
- warumdarum 3mo agoThe old hypsters have to subsidize the new hypsters.
- ares623 3mo agothis counts towards ARR right? would be stupid not to
- wewewedxfgdf 3mo agoI 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.
- artisinal 3mo agoGenerational credit card debt.
- TedDoesntTalk 3mo agoWere you still alive after paying it off?
- ambicapter 3mo agoNo, but they have the internet in the afterlife, apparently.
- 27183 3mo agoThat's good for the credit card company, they can project stable revenue 100k years into the future.
- janalsncm 3mo ago“Bank error in your favor, collect $100”
- foo-bar-baz529 3mo agoHope they’re using 64 bits to store these prices
- sva_ 3mo agofloat will have to do it.
- r0ckarong 3mo agoPff rookie numbers, mine was 375 billion.
- roosgit 3mo agoAmazon, the first quadrillion-dollar company.
- steveBK123 3mo agoGolden era of software productivity they say
- grg0 3mo agoLook how much money AI is making.
- steveBK123 3mo agoWe finally found the ROI!
- yuchen20 3mo agoI 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.
- SegfaultSeagull 3mo agoTime to get a second job buddy.
- rcleveng 3mo agoI did too, those awstrack.me URL's look super suspicious and I hadn't seen this alert trigger before so didn't know what to expect. At first I was sure it was a phishing attempt. Then went to the console (not using those links) Saw there was an outage where the console was wrong (no mention of email alerts) Then I thought I was hacked - what a perfect cover up for someone to evade detection when the console was wrong. Looked at some logs, realized the incident text was just not exhaustive on the impact. Went back to my cup of coffee. Note to self- should have looked here first.
- root-parent 3mo agoWanna bet the description of this job post will be updated by the end of the day? "Software Development Engineer II, AWS Invoicing" https://www.amazon.jobs/de/jobs/10428480/software-development-engineer-ii-aws-invoicing https://www.amazon.jobs/de/jobs/10428480/software-developmen... "...Our platforms are powered by generative AI, large language models, knowledge graphs, and agentic architectures that dynamically compose specialized agents based on context. We apply these capabilities across three reinforcing areas: intelligent launch readiness — where autonomous AI agents analyze, generate, and validate the information needed to go live in a new market; cloud-native service orchestration — where configuration-driven microservices replace per-launch bespoke engineering with centralized, reusable capabilities so that expanding into a new country becomes a zero-code configuration change rather than a development cycle; and continuous validation..."
- sebmellen 3mo ago
- kinkuraj 3mo agoYes I received an 2.8m USD budget alert.
- dirkk0 3mo agosame 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.
- charles_f 3mo agoCan you not set spending limits in AWS?
- reformd 3mo agohe did, 140 billion :D
- inigyou 3mo agoNo you can't. Spending limits imply realtime billing backend flows and they also imply deleting all your data so that you don't pay for storage.
- handoflixue 3mo agoRealtime billing seems entirely within the abilities of AWS. "Limits except for Storage" seems even easier - I don't think I've ever heard of a storage-based billing story, although I'm sure one or two exist
- Planktonne 3mo agoThey could do it; they don't want to.
- minitoar 3mo agoWhat is a storage-based billing story?
- kgwgk 3mo agoOnce upon a time in a cloud kingdom far, far away a big, beautiful bill was issued based on storage causing much disconcertion. Etc.
- throwaway_5753 3mo agoShould have used Fable.
- cyanydeez 3mo agosomeones been dognfooding the AI too muxh
- throwaway_5753 3mo agoScared 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.
- hoppyluke 3mo agoMy estimate was only $21M (vs ~$0.01 average bill). Wish I had checked status sooner and saved myself the panic! My process went: verify email is not phishing (it was), login to console and check dashboard (same amount), attempt to understand cost (cost management kept contradicting itself), try to log support ticket and only on that part did I notice the status notification. At least I can breathe again now!
- zengineer 3mo agosame process, same near heart attack - especially some days ago I had malicious activity on my platform and thought that now they actually found something. Apparently you can trigger an Action (e.g. prevent uploads) when the billing alert triggers, but then my platform wouldn't work anymore, just because AWS had an issue. Also insane that Amazon still hasn't send an email to clarify.
- aareet 3mo agoNews to me! Since my usage is just a hobby app I’m definitely implementing this action response - thank you
- thinkindie 3mo agoA friend of mine went through the same - he got an alert for bill over budget, he logged in and boom 107M$. I was on the phone with him and we checked that he didn’t leak any APIs keys but no traffic at all. I even thought of a breach at a vendor he uses for some s3 stuff before I found this thread on HN.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- sankalpmukim 3mo agoAWS pushed the wishful thinking internal calculator to production.
- glenstein 3mo agoProbably 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.
- NordStreamYacht 3mo agoWith interest, of course.
- bknight1983 3mo agoI'm disappointed I only got a bill for $28M, need to work harder on burning money. Seriously though I thought my life flashed before me
- danousna 3mo agoYeah, small timers, I only got $4,4T. How will I finance this?
- rodeduivel 3mo agoMMT!
- marcosdumay 3mo agoUnfortunately, it's only Amazon that can issue bills backed by that debt, not the GP.
- MichaelNolan 3mo ago$28m actually seems worse. If I wake to a $100b bill, that’s obviously a mistake. If I wake up to a bill in the millions then my first thought would be “oh no what did I do wrong, this will ruin my life”
- kylecazar 3mo agoYou didn't have savings opportunities enabled
- port3000 3mo agoRookie error
- port3000 3mo agoThey have to pay for that AI Capex buildout somehow
- djantje 3mo agoI also like the percentual change, that is a lot of comma's.
- pelagicAustral 3mo agoImagine it not being a bug...
- Sebb767 3mo agoAs the famous saying goes: If you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem.
- RGamma 3mo agoSurprise hyperinflation. Check the breadshelves!
- speedgoose 3mo agoTime to become a shepherd in some remote mountains.
- tgv 3mo agoMine was a mere $49B. Fucking idiots.
- atmosx 3mo agoCheap!
- thisisauserid 3mo agoFinSlops.
- fathermarz 3mo agoJust got mine. $534,366,582,647.75
- jagged-chisel 3mo agoShocking! That seventy five cents is suspicious.
- paulbjensen 3mo agoAWS revenue for 2025 was $128.7 billion, so I'd say probably a bug.
- archerx 3mo agoDouble your yearly revenue with this simple trick…
- yonatan8070 3mo agoVendor-locked customers _hate_ him!
- pfshort 3mo ago117 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.
- rboyd 3mo agoAsk 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.
- whoamii 3mo agoUmmm no. Do not show a sign of weakness like this. Address the problem head on and get a credit card with a bigger limit.
- fron 3mo agoWoke 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
- lijok 3mo agoIf you owe AWS 437k bucks, that’s a big problem for you If you owe AWS 437B bucks, that’s a big problem for AWS
- binaryturtle 3mo agoI wonder how many people may have gotten an actual heart infarct because of that. There may be a person out there that may be dead as a result. It's entirely irresponsible of Amazon to even display such values to the user.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Hamuko 3mo agoReminds me of the time a Robinhood user killed themselves after Robinhood erroneously showed their account balance at -$730k. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55990461 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55990461
- blitzar 3mo agoIn unrelated news I just hit my target for S3 revenue (projections). Promotion meeting locked in for tomorrow (fastest in the companies history), looking forward to being a L2 Amazon employee.
- lostnfound8778 3mo ago[dead]
- nottorp 3mo agoLooks like they set up a LLM to estimate billing?
- lovich 3mo agoYou really should get your spending under control. Unfortunately unless you become one of the real people class through a large lottery, it sounds like you owe the rest of your life to AWS until you can pay off your debts for being so careless.
- reactordev 3mo ago“Due to a rounding error” or a buffer overflow, you now owe INT_MAX to BaldGuyCloudService. Yeah, this most certainly is bad code wrapping around a value. AWS will post a notice soon if they haven’t already.
- mapt 3mo agoAMZN Q2 numbers are in, and it turns out they're going to Goldman Sachs the AI bubble.
- gib444 3mo agoMaybe they accidentally used the Argentine peso ;)
- _joel 3mo agoLess hyper-scaler, more hyper-inflation
- bdangubic 3mo agoeh your typical off-by-7 (zeros) programmer mistake
- rickette 3mo agoSome guy named Claude screwed up.
- hoppp 3mo agoHow much is that in kidneys?
- atmosx 3mo agoA lot.
- AngryKitten 3mo agoYou folks are completely irresponsible with your finances. I only spent $2.4 million last night. You've got to learn to manage your money.
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoYeah, buy less cappuchinos and avocado toast so you can pay your AWS bills people!
- markus_zhang 3mo agoI need to drink/eat those too to feel like I'm an AWS ops guy!
- anzovec 3mo agoIn my 30s, I almost had a heart attack too. I got a notification saying that my cost budget had been increased to one million dollars...
- atmosx 3mo agoLooks like you are the biggest shareholder. Well, going by the popular saying: “You own AWS now”.
- aweiland 3mo agoGlad I saw this. Mine said I racked up $400B yesterday. My usual spend is $15.
- dvh 3mo agoPrompt: bill our aws customers, make no mistakes.
- zengineer 3mo agoor: Increase revenue!
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoI mean just overcharging is one approach to achieving that goal I suppose. But so is imprisoning or exterminating all humans for their own good, as most AI dystopias end up as.
- vel0city 3mo agoPrompt: investigate new ways to fund additional AI datacenters.
- compounding_it 3mo agoAre you sure it’s a bug ? The crypto network you hosted should pay for itself in 10-20 years just like LLMs. Don’t worry. Consider Bank of America until then if you are good on credit score.
- themgt 3mo ago"If you owe AWS a hundred thousand dollars, that's your problem. If you owe AWS three billion dollars, that's Amazon's problem."
- alfiedotwtf 3mo agoVibe Billing
- tedk-42 3mo agofar 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.
- gioazzi 3mo agoHeard of somebody who got 19 quadrillion dollars - I thought they meant Zimbabwean dollars
- Waterluvian 3mo agoThat would have been a great deal!
- elashri 3mo agoone USD is about 362 Zimbabwean dollars. So it would still be about ~53 trillion dollars which is more than the nominal GDP of US and China combined.
- Polizeiposaune 3mo agoFor history here, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe Zimbabwe redenominated its currency three times in 2006, 2008, and 2009, dropping a total of 25 trailing zeros in the process. the 4th Zimbabwean dollar in 2009 was worth 10^25 of the first zimbabwean dollar.
- ownagefool 3mo agoMines was $190,594,974,587,761.20 :)
- HarHarVeryFunny 3mo agoThey should have added "make no mistakes" to the prompt.
- kvcm 3mo agoI had Hermes managing mine, and it made a partial prepayment to help smooth out the bump in my account balance. Unfortunately Billing Support say my $17.4B refund may take up to 10 calendar days to be processed.
- gomid 3mo agoCurious if it's just s3 costs or other services as well?
- jatin_oo71 3mo agofor me it was s3 cost only
- nprateem 3mo agoI guess on the plus side I'm $1.7B better off so I can retire...
- jameskilton 3mo agoMy personal photo backup S3 account, with a budget limit of $10, now going to cost me .... $1,299,988,247,332.56! That was a fun set of emails to wake up to, figured they had to be phishing for how outrageous of a number it was. But nope! Fun little incident they've got going over there.
- roskoalexey 3mo agoTotal forecasted cost for current month $477,000,039,440.24 Insane
- astonex 3mo agoFrom their status page >The second path involves rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem. Want to bet AI code was involved?
- a012 3mo agoIs it still a bet if you have 99.999% chance to win?
- verzali 3mo agoCan I bet you 437 billion dollars?
- CarRamrod 3mo ago>Spawning Sub-Agent: "Dr. Evil"
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoI'm not a betting person but I am looking forward to the postmortem, whether or not AI was involved, and what their code to production verification stuff looks like now. This kind of thing should have been caught by automated tests.
- dvfjsdhgfv 3mo agoThere is an enormous amount of money invested in trying to prove the opposite, for this reason not only they will never admit it, they will actively negate AI was used. It happened before: https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/24/aws-would-rather-blame-engineers-than-ai/4295616 https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/24/aws-would-ra...
- phyzome 3mo agoThey'll never admit it.
- devin-2030 3mo agoWhy would they? Changing colors on the status dashboard needs VP approval.
- elondaits 3mo agoWoke 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.
- throwatdem12311 3mo agoHey man AI makes mistakes sometimes that’s why you need to double check the output.
- abkolan 3mo agoThe panic was real. We read about keys getting stolen all the time. Was about to nuke my set up too.
- dpcx 3mo agoMy estimate was over 2T. Talk about waking up quickly...
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoFor science I hope people are trying to figure out now how they could manage to rack up a 2T bill in a month.
- dpcx 3mo agoMy immediate thought was that someone managed to get an access key, stuffed a ton of data in there, and then was doing a ridiculous amount of egress. That was the only way I could conceivably coming up with anywhere near that much cost.
- netsharc 3mo agoI doubt AWS has capability to do anything to generate $2T of charges, even if one user maxed every billable capability of every resource they have. If I got an email with that amount I would've just laughed at the incompetence that lead to a bug that lead to me getting the email. But I write as a backseat email recipient.
- roskoalexey 3mo agoThey 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.
- anzovec 3mo agosame
- xp84 3mo agoSomehow I highly doubt anyone will leave AWS over this unless their use of AWS is way more low-complexity than the average account. People make similar pronouncements after every us-east-1 outage makes the news, but I feel like AWS would be going out of business by now if people followed through. It reminds me of airlines, where after a particularly grueling irregular ops experience, a few dozen people file off the plane swearing "Never again, <airline name>!" but really, we all must know deep down that the airlines are all subject to the same external inciting factors, internal profit motivations, and human imperfection, and thus all pretty equally likely to cause us a bad day or ruined trip. The effort spent to avoid one isn't really worth it.
- el_memorioso 3mo agoAirlines are all subject to a lot of the same factors, but there are unequivocally better and worse performers in terms of on-time arrivals, by a lot. Take a look at the Air Travel Consumer report for details.
- xp84 3mo ago> unequivocally better and worse performers in terms of on-time arrivals, by a lot. I don't think it's a very good metric to compare them with, though. Those numbers are going to be heavily weighted by conditions at their hub and focus city airports, and speaking more broadly, the cities they serve. Meaning, things that aren't really in their control, and which are either in your control (often, you get a choice of which connecting hub to fly through), or is a fixed risk to you because of your origin/destination, no matter what airline (e.g. if you're flying from/to Orlando in the summer, expect a risk of thunderstorms interfering. Or snow in winter in Chicago.) If I'm travelling from, say, LAX-PDX, United's systemwide on-time performance is not the data I'd care about, because it's probably affected far more by the conditions in their O'Hare and Newark hubs, which I'm not visiting.
- znpy 3mo agoIs AWS in their "move fast and break things" era ?
- jagged-chisel 3mo agoLumber along and smash stuff
- _joel 3mo agoI'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.
- abkolan 3mo agoWill wait for the RCA, the update says that they will resort to last known estimate as of 15 July. I’m guessing that would imply that the bug is at a lower level, write or an ingestion path.
- lordleft 3mo agoGot a message that I owe 37 million on an account that I haven't used in probably...6 years?
- ohnoooooooooo 3mo agodid it recover for you? I still see billions
- aweiland 3mo agoMine has
- ohnoooooooooo 3mo agothx, when? Was it only last day or the whole month of July was inflated?
- ohnoooooooooo 3mo agoDid it recover for you folks? I still see billions of dollars!
- sailfast 3mo agoWho is going to compensate us for the years taken off our lives when we received the alerts?
- supersoftware 3mo ago[dead]
- Group_B 3mo agoYeah nearly had a heart attack this morning. Thought keys were leaked for a sec.
- Executor 3mo agoThis generation is too entitled! He should some learn responsibility by paying the full amount; otherwise Amazon should delete his services/data. Consequences!
- craigmoliver 3mo agoDitto 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.
- graemep 3mo agoSomeone I know woke up this morning to over 3 trillion dollars. Love to see how hyperscalers make your life easier and less worrying.
- lightedman 3mo agoLiteral 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.
- tcp_handshaker 3mo ago>> Literal basic fucking math, Amazon LLMs are notoriously bad at it...
- jdw64 3mo agoI 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.
- devin-2030 3mo agoAt 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.
- xyz7786 3mo ago$250 billion. Nearly died right then and there
- tokioyoyo 3mo agoThank 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.
- tcp_handshaker 3mo agoI would not be so relaxed...Your estimate is so low that is likely to be real :-) You should only be relaxed if its in the Trillions...+
- noisy_boy 3mo agoIf 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.
- carra 3mo agoSeveral 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?
- justusthane 3mo agoWhen someone says "I nearly had a heart attack," it's _highly_ unlikely that they actually nearly had a heart attack. I don't think the chances are good that anyone actually had a heart attack.
- tanseydavid 3mo agoWhile I agree that this phrase is most commonly spoken in a figurative sense, folks with marginal heart health have a much greater than 0% chance of having something of this nature trigger an actual heart attack.
- vindin 3mo agoNot a lawyer but if you can sue for emotional distress for similar situations I would imagine there is an angle here
- tcp_handshaker 3mo agoThree 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.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dang 3mo agoOne user posted a screenshot: https://prnt.sc/UqjcYD3RSQrS https://prnt.sc/UqjcYD3RSQrS Edit: I was just about to credit the user when my internet dropped. The source was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945606 - thanks mirzap!
- sebmellen 3mo agoWow, $139 B.
- jatin_oo71 3mo agostorage, compute cost is increasing AWS be like lets increase prices
- 1234letshaveatw 3mo agobrb, off to buy some AMZN
- rootsu 3mo agoOur org account's bill is showing up as > 100 trillion.
- sebmellen 3mo agoYou've got to grab a screenshot of that.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 3mo agohmm, if these estimates of Amazon profit for the next quarter are correct Bezos is set to become a trillionaire! Take that Musk!!
- jatin_oo71 3mo agoaws becoming first quadrillion dollars company
- mjmasn 3mo agoIt's a good job it was off by such a large amount, or I might have panicked instead of writing it off as a phishing attempt. I had an email saying my $7.50 budget had been exceeded with an actual cost of $3bn.
- axus 3mo agoThis is just Anthropic reaching out to their customers for help with their AWS bill.
- MacCopper 3mo agoMy Budget is 10$. The month forecasted cost associated with this budget is $182,278,249,263.06. Even though I new they could not collect the whole amount, I wondered whether I was hacked. I closed the account, it was an old testing account anyways.
- ryanschaefer 3mo agoThe market *hates* this one weird trick to juice earnings
- tcp_handshaker 3mo agoIf its less than 2 billion is likely to be real :-) I would relax only if its in the trillions ... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- xbar 3mo agoRife.
- tedggh 3mo agoI 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.
- dawnerd 3mo agoThat’s why you always use a spend limited card with variable cost providers.
- myself248 3mo agoOr just own your own hardware. Spend a few bucks at Microcenter, build a machine, and there's simply no mechanism by which they could decide later that you should actually pay 100x more, and then magically suck it out of your bank account. None of this can happen unless you first cede control.
- csomar 3mo agoMost debit/prepaid cards will get rejected. Credit Cards technically have a limit but they really don't. It's an open line to your finances.
- dawnerd 3mo agoI’ve never had a limited card get rejected. Granted I use ones from privacy.com. That’s also what I have hooked up to my aws / amazon.
- myself248 3mo agoThey are also not all that limited. I used a Privacy.com card for a New York Times trial subscription, which of course I could not cancel online, so I just let it expire. A few days past the renewal date, I saw a $waytoomuch charge on my card. I wrote to Privacy, and this was their reply: > Jun 1, 2022, 5:21 PM EDT > I've been reviewing your dispute and wanted to touch base with you to explain what happened. > It appears that the disputed charge is a "force post" by the merchant. This happens when a merchant cannot collect funds for a transaction after repeated attempts and completes the transaction without an authorization — it's literally an unauthorized transaction that's against payment card network rules. It's a pretty sneaky move used by some merchants, and unfortunately, it's not something Privacy can block. > We are refunding the transaction to the original funding source used for this purchase. You should see this refund reflected in your bank statement in the next 5 business days. However, please note that since this merchant uses force posts, they will continue to do this monthly until the subscription is cancelled. Please contact them to have the subscription cancelled. > Let me know if you have any questions or concerns!
- ElevenLathe 3mo agoOur alert was for exceeding $300...by several hundred billion dollars.
- Avicebron 3mo agoNothing like generational debt to kick off a Friday morning
- jerf 3mo agoThis is generational debt for a Kardashev Type III civilization. If there are individuals who are being charged "the whole of the GDP the human race has ever produced", then Amazon is claiming the rest of the world owes them a fairly significant portion of the galaxy if you consider the entire billing claims being made here. There have been some big billing errors in the past but I wouldn't be surprised this is a new record. I know I've seen people charged around 92 quadrillion, which is a rounding error from underflowing a signed 64-bit integer with pennies, but those stories are usually isolated individuals. It sounds like the aggregate error here may comfortably exceed that. Hard to tell how widespread this is; as a data point my ~$2.00/month spend on S3 seems to still be billing correctly, so it must not be affecting everyone. But a few trillion here and a few trillion there and you get up to those quadrillions pretty quick.
- steve1977 3mo agoI mean 3 billion USD is clearly too big to fail, so I wouldn't worry too much
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- rcleveng 3mo agoMy first thought was "Oh hell, who left the NAT Gateway on?"
- jimwilson 3mo ago[dead]
- cryo32 3mo agoHow do we know if our bills were ever right if this made it into production?
- jimbokun 3mo agoThis is a strong argument to either self host or work really hard to be cloud agnostic.
- WalterGR 3mo ago> Anyone else seeing something like this? You can use the search box at the bottom of every page to search for previous posts. This was posted an hour before you posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945241
- boesboes 3mo agoI seem to have spend >35trilion on rds today, sooo yeah, going great at AWS
- ratelimitsteve 3mo agoa billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up
- bobbiechen 3mo agoAWS 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-confirms-166m-billing-error-auditors-find-17m-enterprise-overcharges.htm https://www.techtimes.com/articles/320266/20260712/anthropic...
- AlienRobot 3mo ago>AI billing audit startup Vaudit reviewed $34 million in AI invoices submitted by 60 enterprise customers and found approximately $1.7 million in mistaken overcharges — a billing error rate of roughly five percent. That sounds bad.
- qrios 3mo agoAs 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.
- everforward 3mo agoSomeone said the numbers are all off by 2^30 because they screwed up and are charging the per GB price for each byte. It’s probably an artifact of them all being currency multiples of 2^30
- ardacinar 3mo agoWell, for my case, I was paying $0 (Exactly, I managed to hunt down and delete every last resource in my account a few months ago). It was displaying $430 million for me. I don't think that is 0*2^30.
- everforward 3mo agoHuh, that is odd. Working backwards, that would be ~ $0.40 originally. Wonder if that’s also flat out wrong or if they’re doing some kind of currency handling that breaks when you start dealing with huge multipliers.
- lstodd 3mo agousing floats for currency? that would be grander even than this fuckup.
- berkes 3mo ago> Almost all of them have one number that appears four times, and one or two that appear three times To me that looked suspiciously like string-handling in a weakly typed language. Like when you do `"100" + 1` in JavaScript, or `int("100" * 2)` in Python. I've seen my share of such bugs in PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript. In production. Obviously not as simple as the examples, but subtle, like when a library update changed `someFancyLocalStorage.getOrDefault("lastOrder", 100)` by always casting the value to the type of the default (released as patch release). Or where typedEnvGet() should typecast "numbers", but keeps it a string when theres whitespace `AMOUNT_PER_CALL=100\n`. Or where a number passes through a deep stack of middleware and 99.9% of the times remains an int but in rare race conditions becomes a string. etc. No evidence that's the case here. But from my experience, the repeating and strange formats of numbers hint strongly in that direction.
- hypfer 3mo agoTo be exactly that guy: This cannot happen if you do not do this renting at variable rates. A thing you own doesn't suddenly bill you trillions of dollars in error. It doesn't hyperscale either, but neither do you.
- scrapcode 3mo agoTale as old as time. When I was coming up it took a $20-40/m investment to get a "dedicated" server that you could start tinkering around on. When you couldn't afford that, you bricked the family PC trying to figure out how to configure your own LAMP stack. Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.
- danny_codes 3mo agoHetzner has hard usage cutoffs
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo agoNo not really, nobody has to be using AWS itself per se to be honest, there are still alternatives around. I mean I own a 7$/yr vps that I pay with crypto and my stack usually involves golang/rust and oh I also self host my mail for temp-mail esque things on that server and I have some other servers floating around as well. Its just that everyone uses AWS which is the wrong issue here to be honest. If you ask me, aside from the ram pricing caused by AI inflation, things are pretty good. The issue is that not many people know about server providers and other things and default to AWS/Azure etc. because big companies and small companies alike are using them. Here's a global (interactive) visualization of around ~250 providers, 224 locations and 800 distinct links in 60 countries that I have made if this space interests ya: https://buyvds.net https://buyvds.net
- durron 3mo ago$44 trillion over here, at least our bill was so outrageously high that I just laughed
- mrcwinn 3mo agoSo long as customers are good for it, AWS is about to crush earnings!
- segmondy 3mo agovibe coding for the win.
- cma256 3mo agoIn moments like these I'm reminded of all the people who have committed suicide due to billing errors. This is completely unacceptable. These sorts of errors must _never_ happen.
- anibal-sanchez 3mo agoThe new data centers are more expensive: ACTUAL Amount: $1,046,294,123,330.95
- 1-6 3mo agoFast and loose with billing data. Welcome to the new Amazon.
- shobhitgupta 3mo agoHave even seen a $9.2 trillion for a friend.
- traceroute66 3mo agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681
- nixgeek 3mo agoWow. As a side effect, this outage is handing Corey Quinn material for the next 4 years of AWS shitposting. No longer is NAT Gateway the prime target.
- bradhe 3mo agoCurrent 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.
- xp84 3mo ago"Have you considered using Reserved Instances? You could save up to 2 trillion dollars next month. Book a call with your AWS rep."
- aerhardt 3mo agoOne 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.
- RIMR 3mo agoOh, that's the really fun part. The unprecedented catastrophic event is already happening. Several of them, in fact. By the time we notice, it'll be too late.
- Imustaskforhelp 3mo agoits like slowly boiling the frog
- Finnucane 3mo agoOr slowly boiling a human. The frog is actually smart enough to not fall for that.
- inigyou 3mo agoDownvoted for truth. Frogs do indeed jump out of pots as they gradually get hotter. Humans are less likely to.
- 12_throw_away 3mo agoAny individual human (or frog, obviously) is getting out of the pot when it gets uncomfortable. True stupidity requires a group of humans, all sitting in the pot, telling each other how lucky and special they are to have this wonderful pot, getting paranoid about outsiders who might disrupt their god-given pot-dwelling way of life, and mocking anyone who suggests that the pot might be getting a little too warm.
- 3mo ago
- mariopt 3mo agoVibeBilling, love it
- reaperducer 3mo agoObvs have created an urgent AWS support ticket. I think I would have just waited to see what happened when AWS tried to hit my credit card for $1,700,000,000. When do you ever get that opportunity?
- browningstreet 3mo agoI 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….
- hedora 3mo agoClass action lawsuit time! Either that or 1000’s of small claims court cases. Even with arbitration, the overhead of dealing with that would be crippling. Hopefully someone over there decides to do the right thing, and auto-refund.
- xp84 3mo agoRelevant to this, I've recently noticed a trend of mass tort cases being opened up in the past couple years, and they seem to do very well. The way these seem to work is attorneys identify a company who has clearly ripped people off, and what I presume is a repeatable way to guarantee a win (thus translating to a guaranteed settlement offer). Then they advertise for eligible clients, sign those clients individually to contingency agreements, and run the playbook. A couple months ago after signing up for one of these, I received a check for about $350 (after the agreed-upon 40% attorney fee), from Ticketmaster, and I had another one related to AT&T. It took about 10 minutes more effort from me than a typical class-action settlement, because I had to e-sign those representation papers. So really, there's a third option now, that's much easier than class action, even when class actions don't get certified.
- ofjcihen 3mo agoThere are a hundred small things like this that seem to be popping up in what used to be simple and reliable systems and as much as I know they aren’t ALL because of vibe coding I can’t help but wonder how much is.
- orbasker 3mo agoYes seeing the same, so far no response from AWS support
- rf15 3mo agoOf course, this is only considered an error if the account is unable to pay. /s
- rtkwe 3mo agoAw man I was hoping to punk my manager but our cost estimates are unaffected.
- aisloper 3mo agoI blame A.I. usage
- Taikhoom2010 3mo agoYeah pretty much, must have been vibecoded.
- hedora 3mo agoAnd to think the federal government claims inflation is in the single digits this year!
- hedora 3mo agoDoes the affiliate program still work for AWS? When do I get my referral fee?
- huntoa 3mo agoinvoicemaxxing
- avpushking 3mo agoMe too, hello all. I've got 59 Million dollars in billing threshold reached email from AWS. And felt the same as others, and after half an hour of investigation I saw their message on top of the support page. I have 6 mb for static website stores in S3. No other resources.
- tamimio 3mo agoResults of vibe coding and vibe configurations.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- nblgbg 3mo agoMy guess is that it's because of some vibe-coding stuff! We are using LLMs to write code, validate code and test the code ! What can go wrong ?
- ohnoooooooooo 3mo agodo you see cost ever day for the month of July or just the last day? I also have billions of dollars in cost explorer
- ohnoooooooooo 3mo agonow it is fixed for me as well. issue is still open in aws health center though
- wglass 3mo agoIt'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.
- steve_adams_86 3mo agoA couple of my coworkers think I’m nuts for watching cost explorer so closely but 1. The time it takes to look and notice costs that don’t make sense easily pays for itself, and then some (in my experience). I doubt you spent $7k of your time tracking this down, and you probably noticed optimization opportunities that saved you even more 2. I hate the idea of wasting money on buying Jeff Bezos a bigger yacht
- jarrettcoggin 3mo agoI've personally noticed and saved multiple $xx,xxx monthly cost billing spikes just by take a daily glance at our cost explorer. I'm in the AWS accounts every day doing investigative work anyway that an extra 30-60 seconds is trivial. Seeing something "small" like an ECS task that is continuously failing to start properly because of a bug and repeatedly pulls a container image or a lambda function that's taking longer that it reasonably should (takes 5-10 seconds when it's normally a tens or a few hundred milliseconds) can dramatically drive up a bill in short order.
- inigyou 3mo ago> 2. I hate the idea of wasting money on buying Jeff Bezos a bigger yacht Then you aren't using AWS. At least half of all the money you give to Amazon is yacht money.
- kayo_20211030 3mo agoWhat an `effin disaster. The alert almost gave me a heart attack.
- szge 3mo agoI 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
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- btown 3mo agoIf AWS was a predatory mobile gacha game, we'd get 300 apology gems as credit to our accounts for this mixup, to help us in our rolls for the next 3-letter acronym they release. Do the right thing for the players, Matt!
- cliglot 3mo ago[dead]
- zero_k 3mo agoWow, so true! Domain expertise is apparently not a requirement. At all. Wow.
- thewebguyd 3mo agoOf course not, domain expertise is expensive no matter what the field is, and to the big companies like Amazon the whole point of GenAI is to get rid of those pesky expensive humans and replace them with cheaper humans.
- throwaway43871 3mo agoClearly they weren't tokenmaxxing hard enough or weren't using the latest models /s. What an absolute joke. All just so that line goes up. As if their fees weren't high enough vs. alternatives (especially egress). And I'm sure the pro-AI crowd will keep saying we're luddites for not loving this clearly revolutionary and disruptive tech.
- whatever1 3mo agoIs it even possible to audit the cloud pricing? They just give us a number and we pay.
- sokoloff 3mo agoOn AWS, you can enable CUR (cost and usage reporting) and get detailed, line-item billing figures that you can audit. And naturally, companies like Cloudability [now Apptio] and others have sprung up to do parts of this for you [at a fee, of course...] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/what-is-cur.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/what-is-cur... I'm sure other cloud vendors have similar functionality (because they need this on the back end to do their own billing anyway).
- tanseydavid 3mo agoFor anything below a Trillion, you should just take it out petty-cash. </sarc> My sympathies -- I know I would be overcome with panic in such a situation.
- nneonneo 3mo agoGiven the wild but apparently "consistent" numbers I wonder if we could reverse-engineer the wrong algorithm with enough data points? Maybe the proper cost estimate has some relationship to the reported cost estimate.
- bobson381 3mo agoA guy on the sysadmin subreddit managed to 8x the global GDP https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_i_spent_978_trillion_this_month_should_i/ https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_...
- oersted 3mo agoI liked this comment from that thread :) > I think you should spin up a whole bunch more instances, and try to cause an integer overflow so they they owe you $978 Trillion.
- glaslong 3mo agoSeems like a scam. Call your CC company and issue a chargeback :p
- bdangubic 3mo agoI just invested ALL my money into AMZN cause next earnings report will be FIRE :)
- lelandfe 3mo agoThis just hit global news: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/17/amazon-web-services-customers-trillion-dollar-bills-global-glitch https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/17/amazon-we... > Amazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitch
- euio757 3mo ago> One UK man whose bill is usually less than £1 says he ‘almost had a heart attack’ when he saw £5.8bn invoice That sucks, some people will get legit panic attacks and worse over this, especially for the smaller, more believable numbers in the 50k-500k range. Hope they recover and sue for medical bill costs, emotional damage etc. And like one reddit user suggests, everyone affected should write to their representative about hard billing caps protections
- dabinat 3mo agoIt says a lot about AWS that people believed these estimates were real. Amazon does not have good safeguards to prevent astronomical bills. If someone gets access to your account they can just buy a 3-year reserved instance u7in-24tb.224xlarge and it will add almost $2m to your bill.
- dlev_pika 3mo ago1.5 trillion? Those are rookie numbers. How about $5,544,640,717,404.09? That was in my inbox this morning lmao
- galoisscobi 3mo agoI just deleted my aws account. I don't need these vibes in my life.
- anon49584 3mo agoImagine the chaos if, as people sometimes suggest should happen, AWS shut down running instances in accounts that exceeded a billing threshold..
- daft_pink 3mo agoMaybe 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.
- mawadev 3mo agoThis is just the cloud area, what if Amazon starts vibe charging regular customers because of some bug? Accounts that are directly linked with regular people's payment methods?
- localhostinger 3mo agoI am running a niche SaaS with around 20 users per day on AWS. I too was shocked when I saw the $1.7billion bill, instead of the usual $1.5billion.
- simonreiff 3mo agoQuestion: 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.
- donavanm 3mo agoThats not really how estimates work. The actual metering data is ingested in near real time. The metering * pricing plan is processed within a few hours; thats what youre seeing for “estimated spend” IIRC. The actual billing accumulation is done later, at the end of the cycle, because pricing has cross service discounts, price tranches, credits tied to total spend, etc. “Rolling back” estimated bills is reprocessing the historic metering data by an older or newer pricing plan version. As i mentioned in another comment someone will have messed up a metering type vale (eg GB/B). Thats why theyll need a few hours to redrive the metering data.
- chanux 3mo agoWho else had LinkedIn posts about this flashing before your eyes?
- bryan_w 3mo agoIn an .md file somewhere: "NEVER represent currency with floating point, multiply by 100 and store in an int before doing any math"
- josefritzishere 3mo agoI think I know how Bezos plans to pay for his Billion dollar AI costs.
- jmward01 3mo agoI 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.
- bentobean 3mo agoLucky. I’m on the hook for 54 billion (and change).
- fantasizr 3mo agoit seems like these types of problems have gained frequency in the ai era, or is it just recency bias?
- xrd 3mo agoStop 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" https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YERfTT4McsU https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YERfTT4McsU
- tete 3mo agoIt's okay. They are market leaders. And we use their services cause we can trust that they know what they are doing.
- nrmitchi 3mo ago""" If you own the bank $1000, thats your problem. If you owe the bank $1.7B, thats the banks problem. """ What I would be curious about (and I'm sure AWS will never share) is where the incorrect number came from. If the number is somewhat consistent between some groups of accounts, my first guess would be they started summarizing billing across all accounts in whatever cell/grouping/heirarchy AWS architected internally. Which is just funny.
- 6stringmerc 3mo agoThanks for sharing. I’m currently dealing with Verizon Wireless and their “Jabronibot” claiming I have a fictional account balance due. It has been sent to collections, but still is being asked for by their legacy system. The case studies of “Agents in Billing Departments” and potential shareholder lawsuits / E&O claims / reputational damage will be interesting to me. I worked in “risk management” products years ago and this kind of liability is not easily dollar traded away via contract. Will accountability stick to the Decision Makers or will they try to surrogate to the Service Providers? Hmm.
- lilerjee 3mo agoIt looks like AI is completely done.
- drakmo 3mo agoyeah the AI read billionaring instead of billing
- cad1 3mo agoGo turn off autopay now! For personal accounts anyway
- dlev_pika 3mo ago> $5,544,640,717,404.09 This is what we received this morning
- infamouscow 3mo agoThe charge-back penalties are going to be hilarious and hopefully bankrupting.
- donavanm 3mo agoIve 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.
- pudgywalsh 3mo ago"I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. I always mess up some mundane detail."
- AlotOfReading 3mo agoUnit mistakes happen all the time, which is why you should be using your units library religiously and still being vigilant even then. Worst case I've found was off by 15 orders of magnitude.
- gleenn 3mo agoOne of the Mars landers famously failed due to unit conversion errors from metric to standard.
- swah 3mo agoI prefer to just pay...
- fnoef 3mo agoThat’s the smoking gun. Should have used gigabytes instead of bytes. Thank you for pointing me at the issue.
- victorbjorklund 3mo agoWild.
- artisinal 3mo agoFile a GDPR request to have your account deleted. Then flee the country just to be sure.
- radku 3mo agoI almost got a heart attack seeing a bill for 48B USD!
- phplovesong 3mo agoVibe coded fix, resulted in many having multi billion bills. Claude really did it this time.
- salamo 3mo ago$1.7 billion is small potatoes. My bill is over $155 billion and growing. I'm worried if the trend continues I'll have depleted my rainy day fund.
- tyrelb 3mo agoI was at $5 trillion, on the way to $9 trillion!
- luciana1u 3mo ago[flagged]
- Draiken 3mo agoOnly 1.7? I got $55B up from 41 cents. I literally almost had a heart attack today.
- ahme 3mo agoJust pay it and move on. No need to cause a scene.
- not_your_vase 3mo agoLol, Friday deployment is a bad omen even with LLM. Some things are just unchangeable facts of life.
- raffraffraff 3mo agoOur S3 bill for a single day was $48 trillion
- elzbardico 3mo agoJust got a call from the IMF president begging me to not default my debt with Amazon and offering me credit line and a plan to re-structure my debt so I don't create a global financial crisis with my default.
- kumarski 3mo agoYou're not working hard enough if your AWS bill isn't $1.7B.
- beardsciences 3mo agoI made something that tries to highlight the humor regarding this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950534
- PeterStuer 3mo agoFunny how these errors always go one direction.
- hoppp 3mo agoThis is the second time I hear about this. I am happy my credit card linked to AWS expired. Just in-case my usual $0.00 ends up 100 million
- kazinator 3mo agoIt 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.
- jayzer01 3mo agoYes 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?
- pzh 3mo agoGood news is you finally qualify for Enterprise Support and you've never been closer to a Series B.
- tonymet 3mo agoI hope you have auto pay disabled
- Arslan1997 3mo agoTHis is why I hate API/usage pricing
- LunicLynx 3mo agoNeed some money for a new Launchpad
- tqi 3mo agoHas 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.
- benzingtech 3mo agoyou too with Fable huh?
- sierra1011 3mo agoI got an email this morning. > You requested that we alert you when the actual cost associated with your Monthly AWS budget exceeds $2.00 for the current month. The month actual cost associated with this budget is $646,677,805.51. Current usage: $1.70. I called it a rounding error and figured it would wash out within a couple of days...
- lanceroyy 3mo ago[dead]
- eek2121 3mo agoI saw another post on reddit with something like a hundred trillion dollar bill. I wish I had saved that link to share it, the comments were quite comical!
- ilamont 3mo agoYou know, at one time Amazon was grouped in with all of the other big tech companies as a member of FAANG, as if the company has a culture of solid engineering at its core like Google or Apple. It doesn't anymore, if it ever did. Read the shareholder letters over the last 5 years like this one (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-2025-letter-to-shareholders https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...). Move fast. Embrace AI in every corner of the company. Lay off thousands of people like we're a lean startup. Oh, but make sure to have a senior engineer check any AI code you want to push to production (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017). Amazon has made some impressive software, but there's also a ton of junk getting shipped. Customers and "partners" have to deal with it every single day. Sometimes it's "oops"-level stuff like this, at other times it's AWS regions going dark for hours. Browse the Amazon seller forums (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?sortBy=relevance&dateRange=pastYear&replies=repliesAll&contentType=ALL&searchTerm=attribute https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...). Every day there are stories about back-end things breaking, or AIs overriding attributes or flagging random items as pesticides. The receiving errors at Amazon warehouses are incredible, and take months and multiple support tickets to fix.
- vasco 3mo ago> other times it's AWS regions going dark for hours. They have the best uptime of all major cloud providers.
- _ache_ 3mo agoAnd them, ... actually not an error. Server costs went up with AI needs, you know. The AWS incident is about inaccuracy, not "absurd values". You gotta catch-up or die.
- blobbers 3mo agoJust pay your bill Elon.
- nullorempty 3mo agoThe latest status update says things will be back to normal for everyone on the 19th. This spells for me a busy on-call and work over the weekend. It sucks! You think there will be lessons learnt from mistakes? Not a fucking chance! Business as usual come monday!
- cmiles8 3mo agoWhat’s the over under for this being another AI-fueled engineering screw up for AWS?
- theprop 3mo ago$1.7 billion? That's all? I usually spend around 75 cents a month (migrated off AWS due to it being way too expensive). They emailed me with an estimated bill of $264 billion.
- hahahaa 3mo agoThat's fine. Like they say when you owe $1m it is your problem but if you owe $100m and can't pay it is the bank's problem.
- fnordfnordfnord 3mo agoUrgent? Not for you. This is like that old joke “If you owe a bank thousands, you have a problem; owe a bank a billion, the bank has a problem”
- ngsevers 3mo agoAfter 10 years of building on AWS infra I still had no idea what anything would cost. At some point it just became clear to me that they intentionally designed it this way and that complexity is the feature. I switched to digital ocean last year and really haven't had to think about infrastructure again.
- ngsevers 3mo agoJust a note I thought i'd add, they actually have your estimated next months bill on the upper right hand corner of the page at all times.
- kunxue 3mo ago[dead]
- pkhodiyar 3mo ago[flagged]
- dsifry 3mo agoJust got an alert that we would owe $12 Billion. BILLION. After getting me out of bed and a breathless 15 minutes of investigation, I found: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status#billingconsole_1784338681 https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status#billingconsole_1... which notes this is an ongoing issue on Amazon's Global Billing Console. Thanks for the heart attack, Amazon!
- leobg 3mo agoI had a fun day yesterday. Because I had been contacted by AWS about somebody potentially having gained access to my account. That’s when I logged in. That’s when I saw the 1.3 billion number. I was pretty fast in getting that backdoor closed and hunting down that leak, I can tell you! :D
- koko443 3mo ago[flagged]
- DonHopkins 3mo ago[flagged]
- elnerd 3mo agoI once got a wildly inaccurate billing estimate shortly after I created my AWS account. I could not find a out which resources that would cost me so dearly, and saw no other option to delete the entire account. A few hours later, I got a mail saying the estimate was wrong. Now, I cannot create an AWS account using my email address because you cannot create a new account using the same email address…
- sschueller 3mo agoWhat if the error wasn't so obvious? How many people have been overcharged and never knew?
- bluehatbrit 3mo agoMy alert thresholds are $8 and $10 because I only use aws for some backups to S3. It was reporting my actual spend as $425 billion, and forecast at $777 billion. I thought it was a bad phishing email first, when I saw it in the console I just laughed. I killed my access keys anyway before I noticed the incident on their status page. Checked this morning and it's all back to normal. I'm not sure I've seen anyone with a higher actual / forecast from this. Can anyway top mine?
- peter_retief 3mo agoI got a bill for about R900 for just having a look at some of their services? I will never use them again, they are huge so probably dont really care about small users I have actually replaced most of what they do with Raspberry Pi's using cloudflare tunnels
- nullbio 3mo agoThis is just embarrassing.
- panchtatvam 3mo agoAI doing its "thing". Making billing software work the way it isn't supposed to.
- dudeinjapan 3mo agoI'd talk to your Amazon rep and see if you can get them to agree to $800 million as a compromise. They are usually pretty good at that stuff.
- dolphinscorpion 3mo agoJust pay it and then deal with support via a ticket. ;)
- lordmoma 3mo agoTest is king!
- myshapeprotocol 3mo ago[flagged]
- desktopentree 3mo agoFrom a CFO perspective, this is catastrophic. With monthly billing automatically feeding monthly close pipelines, this would result in results that either need to be adjusted (without proper support) or tank performance until it's fixed on the vendor side. I wouldn't want to be in that situation.
- zftnb666 3mo agoAWS billing is inaccurate by $1.7B and my first thought was "maybe I do owe them that much."
- aareet 3mo agoI’ve just received a budget alert for $25 million! I also created an urgent ticket but haven’t heard back.
- hermes_scanner 3mo ago[flagged]
- hermes_scanner 3mo ago[flagged]
- cosmoz 3mo ago[flagged]