Amazon battles bug that falsely billed AWS customers billions

Some Amazon cloud customers woke up on Friday to a surprise bill estimate that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used. Amazon confirmed on Friday that it’s trying to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs. In an update on its status page, Amazon said it began seeing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday.

But by Friday morning, the company conceded that the “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem. The good news for the customers who were told they “owe” millions or billions to Amazon is they are likely off the hook. The billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.

According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer was quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars. When reached by email, Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson referred TechCrunch to the company’s status page and did not comment further, or answer questions about the bug. The company would not say, when asked, if any AWS accounts had been suspended or paused as a result of the issue.

The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon’s status page. Why this matters: This incident highlights the complexities and risks associated with cloud computing billing systems. For developers and businesses relying on AWS, the error may have caused significant concern and potential business disruption.

While Amazon has assured customers that the estimates do not reflect actual charges, the incident raises questions about the robustness of cloud billing systems and the need for greater transparency. As cloud services continue to grow in complexity and usage, ensuring accurate and reliable billing will become increasingly critical. The resolution of this issue will likely have implications for Amazon's customers and the broader cloud computing industry, and it remains to be seen how Amazon will prevent similar errors in the future.