Amazon Web Services customers around the world were briefly shown estimated cloud bills worth billions and, in some cases, trillions of dollars after a technical issue affected the company’s billing system on Friday.
The error triggered widespread confusion as users opened their AWS billing dashboards and discovered charges far beyond their normal monthly costs.
One of the highest reported estimates reached about $1.5 trillion. Many customers shared screenshots online, revealing invoices that were thousands of times, or even millions of times, higher than usual. Some users initially feared their AWS accounts had been compromised, while others contacted support to determine whether the charges were real.
Among those affected was UK charity Learning Through Landscapes. The organization, which normally spends less than £1 per month on AWS for its school grounds audit application, was shown an estimated bill of about $7.8 billion. The charity’s marketing team said the unexpected figure prompted an immediate investigation to understand what had happened.
The issue also affected individual users. A student in Delhi who typically pays around $1.28 per month saw an estimated charge of more than $10.9 billion. Another customer in the United Kingdom, whose website usually generates a monthly AWS bill of about $15, reported an estimated invoice of roughly $245 billion. Similar reports surfaced from customers in multiple countries as the incorrect billing estimates spread across the platform.
AWS later confirmed that the incident was caused by an issue within its estimated billing calculation system. According to the company, a problem involving unit pricing in the estimated billing computation subsystem resulted in incorrect cost estimates being displayed to customers. Engineers identified the issue and disabled the affected estimation service while they worked to recalculate billing data.
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The company apologized for the confusion and assured customers that the figures shown were only estimated values and did not represent actual charges. AWS said it expected the issue to be resolved after the estimated billing data had been recomputed across its systems.
