Amazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitch | Amazon
People always suspected big tech of being greedy, but it wasn’t quite that way. Amazon Web Services users have faced panic-inducing monthly bills of up to $1.5 trillion for subscriptions that often cost less than the price of a cup of coffee.
Bills from Bangalore to Bolsover caused alarm after a computer glitch resulted in astronomical bills being sent around the world by Jeff Bezos’ company, which provides data and cloud services to millions of customers, from students and small charities to large businesses.
Dan Harvey, marketing manager at Hampshire-based Learning Through Landscapes, told the Guardian: “I nearly had a heart attack when I received an email alert from Amazon Web Services with an invoice for our charity’s school grounds inspection app, which usually costs us less than a pound a month.” It wasn’t even the end of the month yet and Harvey’s toll stood at $7.8bn (£5.8bn); this was slightly up from 43 cents the previous month.
“When we were in full panic mode, I had to do a real investigation with our tech support team trying to figure out what was going on with our account,” he said.
Another user, Bharath, posted a screenshot of his bill on
Sachin, a student in Delhi, usually pays $1.28 a month but his bill ended up being $10.9 billion. I asked AWS support sadly, “Can you please investigate?” he asked
Meanwhile, from Bolsover in Derbyshire, Adreas Zuvich, a Stuart historian who runs a website called The Seventeenth Century Lady, described the “terrible half-hour of extreme stress” he experienced after being informed his bill had reached $245 billion. That’s not far off from Bezos’ net worth. Forbes.
“Our usual bills are around $15 a month,” he told the Guardian. “You can imagine that we were quite surprised… More seriously, this may have caused some people a lot of alarm and even caused health problems.”
“I was terrified,” another customer said after learning they had apparently lost $256 billion to the Seattle-based tech company. “How did this happen?”
The answer: A global mistake by the giant cloud services provider claiming “We strive to be the world’s most customer-centric company.” The crazy figures began appearing in the AWS billing and cost management console at 3.38am UK time on Friday, and as shock, concern and consternation spread across social media, AWS apologized “for any confusion and concern regarding these costs”.
After an hour and a half investigation, “an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing calculation subsystem” was found and the bill estimation system was shut down.
He said it somehow update: “We expect full resolution to take several hours as we work to recalculate estimated billing data.”
Meanwhile, bad surprises continued to arrive on customers’ control panels. As Gerred, an X user in Maine, put it: “Good morning to everyone who has had a heart attack.”
Amazon has been approached for comment.
