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Posted by nprateem 19 hours ago

AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

URL already posted: 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_s...

1075 points | 652 commentspage 7
andystanton 19 hours ago|
A couple of relevant links: - AWS Status Page: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status - Reddit Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1uyuaw7/help_my_bill_s...
jmward01 12 hours ago||
I 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.
sierra1011 7 hours ago||
I 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...

WalterGR 14 hours 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

tqi 8 hours ago||
Has 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.

paulbjensen 17 hours ago||
AWS revenue for 2025 was $128.7 billion, so I'd say probably a bug.
archerx 17 hours ago|
Double your yearly revenue with this simple trick…
yonatan8070 16 hours ago||
Vendor-locked customers _hate_ him!
dpcx 16 hours ago||
My estimate was over 2T. Talk about waking up quickly...
Cthulhu_ 15 hours ago|
For science I hope people are trying to figure out now how they could manage to rack up a 2T bill in a month.
dpcx 14 hours ago||
My 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 13 hours ago||
I 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.

noisy_boy 14 hours ago||
If 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.
nrmitchi 12 hours 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.

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