I've got an estimated bill for $1.7 BILLION over this month. Normal usage is < $5.
Obvs have created an urgent AWS support ticket. Anyone else seeing something like this?
Update: Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1uyuaw7/help_my_bill_s...
I understand people complaining about large bills, but this is over the top!
It's been 2 hours and I still haven't fully calmed down.
Phew.
> You're right to question my calculation. The MCP server failed to connect when I tried to look up the field definition. I guessed instead of validating. This is on me. But look at all the revenue!
I guess you wanted to say 2^30 which makes 1.5$
While we're being pedantic, 2^30 is 28 in normal programming languages ;)
And a distracted tester? And a distracted pipeline of regression tests?
No, the truth is way worst...
Looks like this is a bug w/ S3
I might be a winner.
Folks can track it directly on AWS Health: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
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.
Like “I was scared for a couple minutes on a Friday morning until I saw the vendor status page” is orders of magnitude away from the bar here.
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?
"Operational issue - AWS Billing Console (Global) Service - AWS Billing Console Severity Impacted - Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data"
"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."
All hail the new generations of our uberployers.
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.
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.
$103,515,940,301.79
The messages started as polite and eventually started to get more desperate in tone. At no point were they threatening or adversarial.
Amex realises that threatening would hurt their business trust more than anything. During the great depression, Amex accepted checks from other banks which were falling and paying through their own wallet as a matter of integrity. Amex has always been built around this idea of trust and prestige.
They make most of money from what I have heard on the transaction fees which are more than others (3% compared to 1%). They might get desperate but I am sure that they are one of the last guys who would wanna threaten you if you are paying some large bills for them (as compared to normal credit card companies which might even hire people to extract your loans in some messy situations)
So perhaps be so rich that the credit card company understands it as well and treats ya differently :-D
Host your own people. Host your own.
100K years. Now that's load-bearing ...
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.
"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..."
"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
Yeah, this most certainly is bad code wrapping around a value. AWS will post a notice soon if they haven’t already.
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.
$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.
Insane
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/320266/20260712/anthropic...
Maybe it's not just vibe-coded, maybe the numbers themselves are being hallucinated by an LLM.
It’s probably an artifact of them all being currency multiples of 2^30
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.
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.
Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.
ACTUAL Amount: $1,046,294,123,330.95
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.
By the time we notice, it'll be too late.
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?
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….
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.
So really, there's a third option now, that's much easier than class action, even when class actions don't get certified.
Forecasted month end $18,729,381,032,152.4
Apparently my company owes the combined GDP of France, Germany, and UK to AWs.
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.
Do the right thing for the players, Matt!
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.
It probably shouldn't be legal for banks, hospitals, governments, or any other critical infrastructure to be hosted on AWS if they do things like this.
You should charge your customer 3015000 thousand dollars.
Literally impossible to tell whether this is parody or an actual response any longer.
I challenge anyone to write something so stupid that an LLM couldn't possibly respond with it. I don't believe such limit exists.
(I eventually admitted to myself that Amex isn't a person and thus not really capable of insulting my honor, but it took a while!)
"Senior Software Development Manager, AWS Global Bill Generation" https://www.amazon.jobs/de/jobs/10471948/senior-software-dev...
"We're transforming from monthly batch processing and manual war rooms to continuous billing, autonomous agents, and self-healing infrastructure. We believe operational burden is a technical problem, not a staffing problem"
This looks clearly...a staffing problem...
I think that big tech recently decided that I got 99 problems but staffing ain't one
I guess Nothing is a staffing problem when you make a rule that firing people is always the solution.
In this role you will:
- Design and build agentic AI systems that analyze, generate, and validate...
- Build agentic architectures that compose specialized AI agents dynamically...
- Build AI-driven continuous validation frameworks powered by agentic workflows and large language models that autonomously manage...
Also many places I’ve worked, storage is a huge part of the spend but that depends a lot on what you do. e-commerce doesn’t use a ton of it, but if you handle user-generated content or do any kind of training (LLM, computer vision, etc) then you can very much end up in a place where storage becomes a top line number for infra spend.
GitHub pre-Copilot was probably like that. They host a shitload of data, most of which is just at rest the majority of the time. Storage and networking are probably the majority of their infra costs.
Incidentaly, smaller competitors solved this issue decades ago, while the big cloud decided it is more convenient never to implement it.
That would mean an outage but that is still better than going bankrupt and teach you a thing or two about monitoring.
I wonder if businesses are thinking of ever swinging back to locally hosted, with the increased hostility of the Internet re: AI, vulnerabilities, DoS, and so on.
I never reported this nor took it up with either Amazon or Chase directly. There was a refund of my Whole Foods purchase (they needed to void my purchase and re-ring everything to give me the discounts.. I asked them to refund my purchase and I’d do without my Whole Foods purchase entirely).
Looking back I think at least 3 recent visits were charged to me at full price because of all this. Hard not to think of enshittification and whether Amazon Prime is even worth it, alas.. I live in a fairly rural area at the moment and need delivery.
andystanton•6h ago