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Ive dealt with this error at AWS. It’s a unit error. In my case we _meant_ to charge like 5¢/GB, but missed the unit (GB), and then the billing system defaults to bytes. 5¢ per Byte of data transferred meant some customers were seeing MM bills within hours. Got paged by support around 2am, had it fixed and amendments issues by 3-4am, apology emails shortly after.

Services emit metering values that arent directly tied to prices. Every SKU/line item is defined in a “pricing plan”, with a unit type, regions, and price per unit. The metering records are joined to a pricing plan based on account id, region, sku, etc. mess up the unit type in the pricing plan and the metering data conversion doesnt work, and you get crazy bills.

I got 3 consecutive emails warning that my budget crossed its $18 threshold. Opened it up: cost was 78 million. Thought it was a phishing attempt, logged into my actual account, and... still 78 million. EMOTIONAL DAMAGE.

It's crazy enough this will be fixed soon.

Years ago I found an actual hidden error in my bill. (This was early 2010s). The system was calculating the EC2 reservation savings incorrectly for some of my servers. I was crunching all their detailed usage data on a regular basis in an 18 tab spreadsheet and couldn't get it to fully reconcile. I spent months trying to track down the discrepancy. Once I found it, I had to convince AWS their system was wrong, which took another big chunk of time. Meanwhile the discrepancy continued to accumulate.

After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS. I've never seen a calculation error on their part since.

Apparently what used to be `GB of storage consumed` is confused with `Bytes of storage consumed`, leading to a cool off by 2*30 error.

> You're right to question my calculation. The MCP server failed to connect when I tried to look up the field definition. I guessed instead of validating. This is on me. But look at all the revenue!

One can almost smell the vibes.

This is peanuts compared to a major cybersecurity catastrophe that’s surely in the making.

To give credit to the technology and the people using it - and I’m not being facetious - it’s actually incredible that at the current levels of usage the unprecedented catastrophic event has not yet happened.

Ask for some leniency. Let your account rep know about your budget difficulties and ask if you can make good faith payments of a few billion per month until you get back on your feet.

If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $1.7 billion, that's the bank's problem.

AWS saw Anthropic billing a guy for $16 million on zero usage and thought, why stop at the millions?

https://www.techtimes.com/articles/320266/20260712/anthropic...

I got a 20K bill once and it was actually drafted from my bank account. It took me a couple of months and involving the office of the AG of my state to get the issue resolved and get my money back. Since then I never touched any AWS product, moved my small stuff to Azure. It’s been years since AWS have these issues with billing, you can find the stories online, students billed 60K for a compromised account launching servers to mine crypto which AWS somehow was unable to flag and block, and let run for months.

I realized recently that Whole Foods no longer automatically and reliably detects your Chase Amazon Prime credit card when paying. So they don’t give you the discounted pricing automatically. I wonder how many customers are checking out the way they always do and are paying full price when, for years and decades, this worked fine.

The customer service people I talked to in the grocery store said this changed sometime in the last year. My guess is that it’s an unintended side effect of removing the pay-by-palm feature.

This is obviously unrelated but I joked about what else Amazon wasn’t reliably calculating….

I once got a credit card statement that said estimated time to repay ....... more than 100,000 years. It was discouraging but I did pay it off. And sooner than estimated.

Probably the closest I've ever been to getting a heart attack. Normally <$1 per month, and now suddenly $284,006,266,443.74. Whatever the bug is on their end, this is unforgivable.

Probably the safest bet is to pay your bill in full to stay in good standing and then get refunded the difference when they revise it down.

Vibe coding billing systems is a top-notch idea :)

They sent 3 warnings to my email, ok, I understand bugs happen (probably vibe-coded). But they didn't even send any notification that it's a bug. Going to leave AWS after that.

Maybe they're using too many humans and not enough AI in their software development. That must be it.

Wow, those price increases due to the RAM and storage shortages AI caused are brutal.

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

"Operational issue - AWS Billing Console (Global) Service - AWS Billing Console Severity Impacted - Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data"

Good news is you finally qualify for Enterprise Support and you've never been closer to a Series B.

Stop bragging, The Onion already reported on a one man company who is $1B in debt.

"CEO Reveals How He Used AI To Build One-Person Company That's $1.3 Billion In Debt"

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YERfTT4McsU

Current month $13,648,114,178,401.01 188,253,226,212%

Forecasted month end $18,729,381,032,152.4

Apparently my company owes the combined GDP of France, Germany, and UK to AWs.

117 billion us dollars. Eat that GDP of Kuwait! But yes I have never scrambled so hard to try to get on the phone with someone at AWS in my life. Terrifying 10 minutes until I found that banner on the support page. It should be front and center on the dash, not hidden away. And in yellow.

Yes have gotten that before the hundred billion dollar billing alert. Are you ignoring it? Unit error doesn’t do this does it? Maybe they were hir with malware?

A guy on the sysadmin subreddit managed to 8x the global GDP https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_...

Mine was 10 trillion today. At first I thought it was a lot, but then I realized its still smaller than the US national debt, so it cant be that bad.

Cloud pricing has gotten ridiculous.

Host your own people. Host your own.

It was over $500k in the email I got. Not a fun experience. My hands were trembling.

Makes you wonder - what if there really would be an incident where some massive amount of traffic got routed to your infrastructure by some heavyweight player? Say Wikipedia accidentally switches their IP to your CloudFront? Would you really be on the hook for $500k?

As someone who usually works with data analysis, the distribution of the numbers strikes me as odd. Almost all of them have one number that appears four times, and one or two that appear three times. And overall, there are an unusually small number (0–9) of digits that appear at all.

Maybe it's not just vibe-coded, maybe the numbers themselves are being hallucinated by an LLM.

One user posted a screenshot: https://prnt.sc/UqjcYD3RSQrS

Edit: I was just about to credit the user when my internet dropped. The source was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945606 - thanks mirzap!

This just hit global news: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/17/amazon-we...

> Amazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitch

That’s the smoking gun. Should have used gigabytes instead of bytes. Thank you for pointing me at the issue.

Cynically I wonder if this has an outcome as an unintentional (or intentional) anchoring exercise for future cost increases

How do we know if our bills were ever right if this made it into production?

same here, I am still in shock. took me 10 minutes to find the 'operational issue' message in the dashboard. longest 10 minutes of my life.

It would not make sense for even a 1200 baud dial-up BBS from 1985 to charge by the byte.

In 2026, the gigabyte should probably be the default/minimum unit for something like AWS.

Question: Why does AWS need to roll back estimated bills to a "last known good" state? I get wanting to do that for ACTUAL billing mistakes, but for estimates, they're just that -- approximations. I guess it's fine for predictive purposes to store estimates so they can be compared to actual usage and optimized. But why would AWS bind the values of present estimates to the estimates made earlier in the month. The calculation should always be:

1. Current month's usage * applicable rates; + 2. Estimated future usage for the month * applicable rates.

And Item 1 obviously requires proper data persistence, but Item 2 is just a projection. If they don't have Item 1 correct, AWS's whole system is in question, but I don't think that's the issue. I'm going to guess now -- looking forward to reading the root cause analysis -- that the problem is that someone decided to get too fancy with the estimates, and built a latent requirement that all prior estimates for the month must be available to compute the current estimate. Without estimates working, no estimates are available, and some denominator in an averaging or smoothing or normalizing function goes to 0; then everyone's estimated bill explodes without bound (subject to floating-point arithmetic) resulting in trillion-dollar estimates.

I wonder what's going on; they still don't have a potential solution after 7 hours and they have multiple teams on it. Never seen anything quite like this

I feel much better after seeing the $B estimates here; I only have an estimate of $34M so far

Folks can track it directly on AWS Health: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I hope you have auto pay disabled

I made something that tries to highlight the humor regarding this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950534

This is the second time I hear about this. I am happy my credit card linked to AWS expired. Just in-case my usual $0.00 ends up 100 million

Maybe it’s one of those absurd situations where canceling a service doesn’t actually stop the charges. Instead, they quietly begin billing you for some random add-on that was bundled with the original service. You never knew it existed, never knew it had to be canceled separately, and now you’re paying full price for a completely pointless ghost service because the only thing it was tied to has already been canceled.

It sounds ridiculous, but something very similar happened to me with Amazon WorkSpaces. During the WorkSpaces setup, an AWS Active Directory (Directory Service) instance was provisioned as part of the deployment. When I later canceled WorkSpaces, I had no idea the Directory Service had to be deleted separately. I kept getting billed for it, and it ultimately cost more per month than the WorkSpace itself had.

Looks like they set up a LLM to estimate billing?

I generally think AWS is better than GCP and azure, but them not allowing spending caps is a big worry source for me and something that has made me pause and rethink using them. A bad click or a bad actor can create tens of thousands of dollars of spend nearly instantly and they can, and will, bill you for it. I can understand that stopping services is hard but some system would be good. For instance, if they had a two tier system where you could stop new services and active things like EC2 would shut down (but not delete) if spend is > x, that kind of thing. Some sort of 'stop the bleeding' concept would give me a lot of piece of mind using them.

Tale as old as time. When I was coming up it took a $20-40/m investment to get a "dedicated" server that you could start tinkering around on. When you couldn't afford that, you bricked the family PC trying to figure out how to configure your own LAMP stack.

Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.

They have to pay for that AI Capex buildout somehow

""" If you own the bank $1000, thats your problem.

If you owe the bank $1.7B, thats the banks problem. """

What I would be curious about (and I'm sure AWS will never share) is where the incorrect number came from. If the number is somewhat consistent between some groups of accounts, my first guess would be they started summarizing billing across all accounts in whatever cell/grouping/heirarchy AWS architected internally.

Which is just funny.

Yes, I've got an estimated bill of $4bn. Probably related to the ongoing "Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data" incident?

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

logged in this morning to find a bill of $595 Billion... heart rate went through the roof... then I noticed the open issue, phew! nice one guys... you got me there...

But with AWS costs rising anyway (not by that much but OK), I'm probably not the only one to start reconsidering their cloud strategy. I think this might have just pushed me over the edge.

AWS pushed the wishful thinking internal calculator to production.

Just pay it and move on. No need to cause a scene.

$1.7 billion is small potatoes. My bill is over $155 billion and growing. I'm worried if the trend continues I'll have depleted my rainy day fund.

I was actually in the toilet when I got an email I owe them $36,869,876,146.51. I literally just shit myself.

My guess is that it's because of some vibe-coding stuff! We are using LLMs to write code, validate code and test the code ! What can go wrong ?

You're not working hard enough if your AWS bill isn't $1.7B.

Lol, Friday deployment is a bad omen even with LLM. Some things are just unchangeable facts of life.

A couple of relevant links: - AWS Status Page: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status - Reddit Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1uyuaw7/help_my_bill_s...

AWS revenue for 2025 was $128.7 billion, so I'd say probably a bug.

Funny how these errors always go one direction.

somewhere a junior dev at AWS just learned their billing dashboard has been off by a factor of a billion and is currently having the worst shower of their career

Only 1.7? I got $55B up from 41 cents.

I literally almost had a heart attack today.

I just deleted my aws account. I don't need these vibes in my life.

If AWS was a predatory mobile gacha game, we'd get 300 apology gems as credit to our accounts for this mixup, to help us in our rolls for the next 3-letter acronym they release.

Do the right thing for the players, Matt!

This is just the cloud area, what if Amazon starts vibe charging regular customers because of some bug? Accounts that are directly linked with regular people's payment methods?

Just got a budget alert that I owe $286,486,223.88 on a hobby aws account, almost got a heart attack.

Are you sure it’s a bug ?

The crypto network you hosted should pay for itself in 10-20 years just like LLMs. Don’t worry. Consider Bank of America until then if you are good on credit score.

Our S3 bill for a single day was $48 trillion

It's okay. They are market leaders. And we use their services cause we can trust that they know what they are doing.

Help, what is this number - US$87,967,679,887,258.36

Should have used Fable.

Mine is showing $241,946,798,744.75. I know it will be reverted, but for a brief minute there I suspected someone compromised my account and triggered rust rewrite of everything using thousands of agents via Bedrock :)

Phew.

Yes, an incident is ongoing https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

For anything below a Trillion, you should just take it out petty-cash. </sarc>

My sympathies -- I know I would be overcome with panic in such a situation.

I am running a niche SaaS with around 20 users per day on AWS.

I too was shocked when I saw the $1.7billion bill, instead of the usual $1.5billion.

I almost got a heart attack seeing a bill for 48B USD!

It's a good job it was off by such a large amount, or I might have panicked instead of writing it off as a phishing attempt. I had an email saying my $7.50 budget had been exceeded with an actual cost of $3bn.

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

Looks like this is a bug w/ S3

My first thought was "Oh hell, who left the NAT Gateway on?"

Wow. As a side effect, this outage is handing Corey Quinn material for the next 4 years of AWS shitposting. No longer is NAT Gateway the prime target.

Will wait for the RCA, the update says that they will resort to last known estimate as of 15 July. I’m guessing that would imply that the bug is at a lower level, write or an ingestion path.

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681

at $1.7 billion, that unit conversion error is now the most expensive TODO comment in software history

Maybe this is a new strategy to scare people into finally locking down their old, unused AWS accounts. It sure worked for me!

Same here. Usually $0.15 per month, current bill is $15.4 billion.

Is it even possible to audit the cloud pricing? They just give us a number and we pay.

In my 30s, I almost had a heart attack too. I got a notification saying that my cost budget had been increased to one million dollars...

hmm, if these estimates of Amazon profit for the next quarter are correct Bezos is set to become a trillionaire! Take that Musk!!

Glad I saw this. Mine said I racked up $400B yesterday. My usual spend is $15.

Aws has created more unicorns than any accelerators.

Go turn off autopay now! For personal accounts anyway

Total forecasted cost for current month $477,000,039,440.24

Insane

Hope they’re using 64 bits to store these prices

And to think the federal government claims inflation is in the single digits this year!

Golden era of software productivity they say

Who else had LinkedIn posts about this flashing before your eyes?

“Due to a rounding error” or a buffer overflow, you now owe INT_MAX to BaldGuyCloudService.

Yeah, this most certainly is bad code wrapping around a value. AWS will post a notice soon if they haven’t already.

Does the affiliate program still work for AWS? When do I get my referral fee?

Seems like a scam. Call your CC company and issue a chargeback :p

I have $13,034.40, while not having used AWS for the last 8 months. Not as much but still crapped my pants

Aw man I was hoping to punk my manager but our cost estimates are unaffected.

$44 trillion over here, at least our bill was so outrageously high that I just laughed

Well, no coffee needed this morning.

$103,515,940,301.79

I also like the percentual change, that is a lot of comma's.

The panic was real. We read about keys getting stolen all the time. Was about to nuke my set up too.

Lucky. I’m on the hook for 54 billion (and change).

What an `effin disaster. The alert almost gave me a heart attack.

This is a strong argument to either self host or work really hard to be cloud agnostic.

This is just Anthropic reaching out to their customers for help with their AWS bill.

Our alert was for exceeding $300...by several hundred billion dollars.

It looks like AI is completely done.

I got 109 billion - am I the winner?

it seems like these types of problems have gained frequency in the ai era, or is it just recency bias?

The new data centers are more expensive:

ACTUAL Amount: $1,046,294,123,330.95

Just got a call from the IMF president begging me to not default my debt with Amazon and offering me credit line and a plan to re-structure my debt so I don't create a global financial crisis with my default.

The market *hates* this one weird trick to juice earnings

Our org account's bill is showing up as > 100 trillion.

I prefer to just pay...

Nothing like generational debt to kick off a Friday morning

I'm disappointed I only got a bill for $28M, need to work harder on burning money. Seriously though I thought my life flashed before me

yeah.. i just to a daily cost alert.. it was only 23 trillion dollars this month. i thought, hmm seems kind of high this month.

Looks like you are the biggest shareholder. Well, going by the popular saying: “You own AWS now”.

To be exactly that guy:

This cannot happen if you do not do this renting at variable rates.

A thing you own doesn't suddenly bill you trillions of dollars in error. It doesn't hyperscale either, but neither do you.

Have even seen a $9.2 trillion for a friend.

Some guy named Claude screwed up.

I had Hermes managing mine, and it made a partial prepayment to help smooth out the bump in my account balance. Unfortunately Billing Support say my $17.4B refund may take up to 10 calendar days to be processed.

Vibe coded fix, resulted in many having multi billion bills. Claude really did it this time.

$250 billion. Nearly died right then and there

Amazon, the first quadrillion-dollar company.

FinSlops.

yeah the AI read billionaring instead of billing

Just got mine. $534,366,582,647.75

Wild.

VibeBilling, love it

The charge-back penalties are going to be hilarious and hopefully bankrupting.

> $5,544,640,717,404.09

This is what we received this morning

do you see cost ever day for the month of July or just the last day? I also have billions of dollars in cost explorer

I expect such incidents like this to continue. So please keep vibe coding.

Curious if it's just s3 costs or other services as well?

Thanks for sharing.

I’m currently dealing with Verizon Wireless and their “Jabronibot” claiming I have a fictional account balance due. It has been sent to collections, but still is being asked for by their legacy system.

The case studies of “Agents in Billing Departments” and potential shareholder lawsuits / E&O claims / reputational damage will be interesting to me. I worked in “risk management” products years ago and this kind of liability is not easily dollar traded away via contract. Will accountability stick to the Decision Makers or will they try to surrogate to the Service Providers? Hmm.

This generation is too entitled! He should some learn responsibility by paying the full amount; otherwise Amazon should delete his services/data. Consequences!

$627,487,837,871.49

I might be a winner.

Yea, same here. $420M+ bill, when we have <10$ per month usually.

File a GDPR request to have your account deleted.

Then flee the country just to be sure.

I think I know how Bezos plans to pay for his Billion dollar AI costs.

In an .md file somewhere:

"NEVER represent currency with floating point, multiply by 100 and store in an int before doing any math"

How much is that in kidneys?

I just invested ALL my money into AMZN cause next earnings report will be FIRE :)

Imagine the chaos if, as people sometimes suggest should happen, AWS shut down running instances in accounts that exceeded a billing threshold..

Yes I received an 2.8m USD budget alert.

Results of vibe coding and vibe configurations.

Obvs have created an urgent AWS support ticket.

I think I would have just waited to see what happened when AWS tried to hit my credit card for $1,700,000,000.

When do you ever get that opportunity?

So long as customers are good for it, AWS is about to crush earnings!

My personal photo backup S3 account, with a budget limit of $10, now going to cost me ....

$1,299,988,247,332.56!

That was a fun set of emails to wake up to, figured they had to be phishing for how outrageous of a number it was. But nope! Fun little incident they've got going over there.

Rife.

If its less than 2 billion is likely to be real :-) I would relax only if its in the trillions ...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681

I guess on the plus side I'm $1.7B better off so I can retire...

Is AWS in their "move fast and break things" era ?

AWS has become the uber employer: before AWS, you just had regular employers steeling employee wages bit by bit by forcing work, skipping breaks, etc.

All hail the new generations of our uberployers.

Same, i am now a slave to Jeff Bezos to the end of my life.

Mine was a mere $49B. Fucking idiots.

storage, compute cost is increasing AWS be like lets increase prices

AMZN Q2 numbers are in, and it turns out they're going to Goldman Sachs the AI bubble.

I got estimated costs of $56.something billions. Usually ~$100/month. My heart rate currently still sits at around 160 bpm. Motherfuckers.

Imagine it not being a bug...

invoicemaxxing

aws becoming first quadrillion dollars company

You really should get your spending under control. Unfortunately unless you become one of the real people class through a large lottery, it sounds like you owe the rest of your life to AWS until you can pay off your debts for being so careless.

someones been dognfooding the AI too muxh

Fast and loose with billing data. Welcome to the new Amazon.

a billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up

brb, off to buy some AMZN

this counts towards ARR right? would be stupid not to

Uhh class action incoming? $34,909,930,575.09 over here.

Pff rookie numbers, mine was 375 billion.

You didn't have savings opportunities enabled

I blame A.I. usage

eh your typical off-by-7 (zeros) programmer mistake

In unrelated news I just hit my target for S3 revenue (projections). Promotion meeting locked in for tomorrow (fastest in the companies history), looking forward to being a L2 Amazon employee.

Don't worry. With so much debt banks start to treat you with respect. /S

Honestly, I would worry more about estimated billing that seems plausible in general, but is way to high for you personally. These ridiculous amounts? Not so much.

Clearly they weren't tokenmaxxing hard enough or weren't using the latest models /s.

What an absolute joke. All just so that line goes up. As if their fees weren't high enough vs. alternatives (especially egress). And I'm sure the pro-AI crowd will keep saying we're luddites for not loving this clearly revolutionary and disruptive tech.

Of course, this is only considered an error if the account is unable to pay. /s