People always suspected big tech was greedy, but not quite like this. Patrons of Amazon Web Services have been landed with panic-inducing monthly bills running as high as $1.5tn for subscriptions that usually cost less than the price of a cup of coffee.
From Bangalore to Bolsover, the bills have been causing alarm after a computer glitch resulted in the astronomical invoices being dispatched around the world by Jeff Bezos’s company, which provides data and cloud services to millions of customers, from students and small charities to big businesses.
“I almost had a heart attack when I received an email alert from Amazon Web Services with the billing for our charity’s school grounds audit app, which usually costs us less than a pound per month,” Dan Harvey, the head of marketing at the Hampshire-based Learning Through Landscapes told the Guardian. It was not even the end of the month and Harvey’s bill was standing at $7.8bn (£5.8bn), somewhat more than the previous month’s 43 cents.
“I had to have a real dig around with our tech support team, while I was in full panic mode, trying to find what was going on in our account,” he said.
Another user, Bharath, posted on X with a screenshot of his bill calmly informing him his usage was up 745,728,201,771% on the previous month: “I just saw $1.5tn on my AWS bill and my soul left my body.”
Sachin, a student in Delhi, usually pays $1.28 a month but was billed $10.9bn. “Could you please investigate,” he plaintively asked AWS support
Meanwhile, in Bolsover in Derbyshire, Andrea Zuvich, a historian of the Stuart period who runs a website called The Seventeenth Century Lady, recounted a “horrible half hour of extreme stress” after she was informed her bill had reached $245bn – not far shy of Bezos’s net worth, according to Forbes.
“Our usual bills are around $15 a month,” she said. “You can imagine we were pretty surprised … On a more serious note, this may have alarmed some people very greatly, and even have caused health issues.”
“I’m terrified,” said another customer after learning they were apparently on the hook for $256bn to the Seattle-headquartered tech company. “How did this happen?”
The answer: a global glitch by the giant cloud services provider that claims “we strive to be Earth’s most customer-centric company”. The crazy figures started to be displayed on the AWS billing and cost management console at 3.38am UK time on Friday and as the shock, worry and bemusement spilled across social media, the company apologised “for any confusion and concern around these costs”.
After an hour and a half of investigation it found “an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem” and shut off the bill estimation system.
It said in an update: “We expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data.”
Meanwhile, the nasty surprises kept arriving on customers’ dashboards. As Gerred, an X user in Maine, put it: “Good morning to everyone enjoying their heart attacks.”
Amazon has been approached for comment.
