Amazon works to fix AWS billing bug showing giant customer charges

Amazon said Friday it is working to fix a billing problem in Amazon Web Services that made some customers appear to owe eye-popping sums for cloud use. For anyone who relies on AWS, the immediate takeaway is that Amazon says the figures are inaccurate and do not represent real charges.

AWS is Amazon’s cloud computing unit, used by companies and developers to rent computing power, storage and other internet infrastructure instead of running their own servers. Its billing console is the online dashboard where customers track estimated charges, so a faulty number there can quickly create confusion even if no real payment is due.

Amazon said on its AWS status page that it began detecting incorrect billing information late Thursday. By Friday morning, the company said a rollback of a recent change had not fixed the problem. Amazon attributed the issue to a change tied to its “billing computation subsystem,” the part of the billing process that calculates what customers are estimated to owe.

The company said the displayed estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” according to its status page. In plain English, Amazon is saying the numbers showing up in affected accounts are bad math from the system, rather than a true record of services customers consumed.

Customers report unusually high estimates

Screenshots posted by AWS customers on Reddit showed some accounts displaying monthly estimates far outside normal usage levels. According to those posts, one customer saw a bill estimate close to $2.5 billion. Other screenshots showed apparent charges ranging from several million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Reddit posts also indicated that at least some customers were seeing these numbers for cloud services they said they had not used. Amazon’s public status update did not give a count of affected customers or say which services were involved.

Amazon said on its status page that the issue was expected to continue for several more hours. The company’s update did not say when all affected billing estimates would be corrected.

What the bug appears to mean

A billing estimate is not the same as a finalized invoice. Estimates can change during a billing period as cloud usage is recorded, discounts are applied or corrections are made. In this case, Amazon said the estimates themselves are wrong, which means affected customers should not treat the displayed amounts as a valid measure of their AWS spending.

The episode is a reminder that cloud billing depends on automated systems that meter usage and translate it into dollars. When that calculation layer breaks, the dashboard can show numbers that look serious even when the underlying usage has not changed.

An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment, according to TechCrunch. Amazon’s status page remained the company’s main public update on the incident Friday morning.

This story draws on original reporting from TechCrunch.