AWS Billing Glitch Hits Customers With Billions of Bills

A glitch is The payment of Amazon Web Services led some customers to believe that they owed the fifth largest company in the world billions of dollars. Oops!

Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, was one of the customers affected. This morning, he woke up with a problem email Warning from AWS: He charged more than $1.5 billion in fees, and his August 1 bill was about to be more than $3 billion.

“I’ve had this account for 6+ years and during that time my monthly expenses have never exceeded $0.02,” Radjewski told WIRED. He shared photos of his three most recent monthly AWS invoices. Everyone came out $0.01.

Based on responses to the AWS Support account on X, Radjewski is not alone. Others have received the same surprising message: $22 billion; $75 billion; $110 billion. “Blud why did you hit me with the price of 5 million USD what did I do,” one user said he wrote. “Please explain, man, my heart is breaking.”

When reached for comment, Amazon spokeswoman Aisha Johnson referred WIRED to AWS Service Health Dashboard. While it is unclear how many customers have been affected, the dashboard indicated that the issue is “global.”

Dashboard reported that the rental contractor “began showing incorrect statistics” on Thursday, July 16 at 10:38 PM ET.

The company began investigating the issue six hours later, on the dashboard, and determined that the “cause” of the error was “a group pricing problem within the payment calculation process.” It didn’t say what the problem was.

In other updates, AWS said it was “reintroducing recent changes to computer billing,” and said it was trying to revert to “the last known billing cycle.” It also said it would “pause the payment calculation.”

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

In the end, some customers choose to ship.

One Reddit user posted a picture of their “Costs and Usage” subreddit in the AWS subreddit, which shows that they spent $7.1 trillion in service fees as of July 1—more than double Amazon’s market share.