Amazon is working to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that incorrectly displayed enormous charges for some customers. On Friday, multiple AWS users reported waking up to bill estimates claiming they owed millions or even billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used. Screenshots shared on Reddit showed one customer quoted nearly $2.5 billion for the month, with others seeing figures ranging from a few million to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Amazon stated on its status page that it began detecting inaccurate billing data late Thursday. The issue was tied to a recent change in its billing computation subsystem. By Friday morning, the company acknowledged that rolling back the change had not fixed the problem. Importantly, Amazon stressed that the inflated billing estimates do not reflect actual usage or charges, meaning affected customers are not truly liable for the amounts shown.
When contacted, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson directed inquiries to the status page and declined further comment. The company would not say whether any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused because of the erroneous bills. Amazon indicated the issue was expected to persist for several more hours while engineers continued working on a fix.