Amazon fixes AWS billing system failure, some customers mistakenly charged billions of dollars
Amazon confirms that the AWS billing portal experienced a malfunction, causing some customers' billing estimates to show outstanding amounts ranging from millions to billions of dollars. This anomaly originated from changes made to the billing calculation subsystem on Thursday evening, and the rollback operation did not immediately resolve the issue. Amazon stated that this estimate does not reflect actual usage, and affected customers are unlikely to incur charges, with the problem expected to last for several hours
Some Amazon Web Services customers discovered this Friday that their bill estimates showed they owed billions of dollars, despite not actually using the related services.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it is working to resolve a glitch in its AWS billing portal. This glitch caused some customers to see cloud computing charges of millions or even billions of dollars owed.
In an update on its status page, Amazon stated that it began noticing anomalies in billing data starting Thursday evening. However, by Friday morning, the company acknowledged that "rolling back recent changes did not resolve the issue," noting that the change involved the billing calculation subsystem.
The good news is that those customers displayed as "owing" millions or billions of dollars are likely not responsible for these charges. Amazon stated that the bill estimates "do not reflect actual usage and costs."
According to screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer's AWS usage bill estimate for the month was close to $2.5 billion, while other customers received similar alerts, with amounts ranging from millions to hundreds of millions of dollars.
An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to Amazon's status page, the issue is expected to last for several more hours
