AWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion

415 points by nprateem 6 hours ago


URL already posted: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

I've got an estimated bill for $1.7 BILLION over this month. Normal usage is < $5.

Obvs have created an urgent AWS support ticket. Anyone else seeing something like this?

Update: Reddit link: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1uyuaw7/help_my_bill_s...

yuchen20 - 5 hours ago

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.

wglass - 23 minutes ago

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.

aerhardt - an hour ago

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.

lukaslueg - 6 hours ago

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!

daft_pink - 4 minutes ago

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.

bobbiechen - an hour ago

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...

ruddct - 5 hours ago

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

browningstreet - an hour ago

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….

mawadev - 2 minutes ago

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?

szge - 8 minutes ago

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

lelandfe - 8 minutes ago

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

rboyd - 4 hours ago

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.

tedggh - an hour ago

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.

wewewedxfgdf - 5 hours ago

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.

bobson381 - 11 minutes ago

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

sscaryterry - 5 hours ago

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

roskoalexey - 3 hours ago

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.

pqvst - 6 hours ago

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.

bradhe - an hour ago

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.

glenstein - 4 hours ago

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.

philipallstar - 6 hours ago

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

mrtksn - 5 hours ago

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

galoisscobi - 8 minutes ago

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

qrios - an hour ago

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.

pcarmichael - 5 hours ago

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

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

pfshort - 4 hours ago

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.

dgrin91 - 3 hours ago

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.

tanseydavid - 13 minutes ago

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.

dv_dt - 5 hours ago

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

nblgbg - 27 minutes ago

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 ?

wewewedxfgdf - 5 hours ago

Cloud pricing has gotten ridiculous.

Host your own people. Host your own.

btown - 18 minutes ago

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!

cryo32 - an hour ago

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

dang - 2 hours ago

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

glaslong - 11 minutes ago

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

scrapcode - an hour ago

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.

iamrik9 - 6 hours ago

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

whatever1 - 16 minutes ago

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

TekMol - 6 hours ago

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?

marksk - 5 hours ago

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.

dirkk0 - 5 hours ago

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.

nottorp - 4 hours ago

Looks like they set up a LLM to estimate billing?

kayo_20211030 - 23 minutes ago

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

luciana1u - an hour ago

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

port3000 - 4 hours ago

They have to pay for that AI Capex buildout somehow

nixgeek - an hour ago

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.

Sheepzez - 5 hours ago

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

traceroute66 - an hour ago

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

bdangubic - 9 minutes ago

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

hedora - 37 minutes ago

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

hedora - 41 minutes ago

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

sankalpmukim - 4 hours ago

AWS pushed the wishful thinking internal calculator to production.

rtkwe - 44 minutes ago

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

paulbjensen - 4 hours ago

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

mjmasn - 2 hours ago

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.

rcleveng - an hour ago

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

im-broke - 5 hours ago

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

mlitwiniuk - 6 hours ago

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

- 2 hours ago
[deleted]
andystanton - 6 hours ago

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...

abkolan - 3 hours ago

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.

anon49584 - 7 minutes ago

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

durron - an hour ago

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

compounding_it - 4 hours ago

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.

bryanrasmussen - 2 hours ago

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

ohnoooooooooo - 24 minutes ago

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

anibal-sanchez - an hour ago

The new data centers are more expensive:

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

anzovec - 4 hours ago

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...

roskoalexey - 3 hours ago

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

Insane

foo-bar-baz529 - 5 hours ago

Hope they’re using 64 bits to store these prices

csunbird - 6 hours ago

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

shobhitgupta - an hour ago

Have even seen a $9.2 trillion for a friend.

jimbokun - an hour ago

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

steveBK123 - 5 hours ago

Golden era of software productivity they say

zcemycl - 6 hours ago

Aws has created more unicorns than any accelerators.

throwaway_5753 - 5 hours ago

Should have used Fable.

lsdafjasd - 5 hours ago

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

meraku - 6 hours ago

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

josefdlange - 5 hours ago

Well, no coffee needed this morning.

$103,515,940,301.79

ElevenLathe - an hour ago

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

axus - 2 hours ago

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

cifvts - 5 hours ago

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

abkolan - 3 hours ago

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

princetman - 6 hours ago

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.

akerl_ - 6 hours ago

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

Looks like this is a bug w/ S3

hypfer - an hour ago

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.

ryanschaefer - 2 hours ago

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

Avicebron - an hour ago

Nothing like generational debt to kick off a Friday morning

rootsu - 2 hours ago

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

aweiland - 4 hours ago

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

tamimio - 29 minutes ago

Results of vibe coding and vibe configurations.

mariopt - an hour ago

VibeBilling, love it

AegirLeet - 6 hours ago

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

reactordev - 4 hours ago

“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.

ninjin-carh - 6 hours ago

I got 109 billion - am I the winner?

djantje - 4 hours ago

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

- 18 minutes ago
[deleted]
xyz7786 - 2 hours ago

$250 billion. Nearly died right then and there

roosgit - 5 hours ago

Amazon, the first quadrillion-dollar company.

fathermarz - 4 hours ago

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

atmosx - 4 hours ago

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

bknight1983 - 4 hours ago

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

reaperducer - an hour ago

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?

kvcm - 4 hours ago

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.

rickette - 4 hours ago

Some guy named Claude screwed up.

cmollis - 5 hours ago

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.

huntoa - 36 minutes ago

invoicemaxxing

gomid - 4 hours ago

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

mrcwinn - an hour ago

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

thisisauserid - 4 hours ago

FinSlops.

rvz - 6 hours ago

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

realizer - 6 hours ago

$627,487,837,871.49

I might be a winner.

Executor - 3 hours ago

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

kinkuraj - 5 hours ago

Yes I received an 2.8m USD budget alert.

balintpeter - 6 hours ago

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

xbar - 2 hours ago

Rife.

tcp_handshaker - 2 hours ago

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

nprateem - 4 hours ago

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

znpy - 3 hours ago

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

jatin_oo71 - 2 hours ago

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

hokkos - 5 hours ago

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

cyanydeez - 5 hours ago

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.

1-6 - an hour ago

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

hoppp - 4 hours ago

How much is that in kidneys?

jatin_oo71 - 2 hours ago

aws becoming first quadrillion dollars company

jameskilton - 3 hours ago

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.

ratelimitsteve - an hour ago

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

- 2 hours ago
[deleted]
tgv - 4 hours ago

Mine was a mere $49B. Fucking idiots.

mapt - 4 hours ago

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

1234letshaveatw - 2 hours ago

brb, off to buy some AMZN

ares623 - 5 hours ago

this counts towards ARR right? would be stupid not to

pelagicAustral - 4 hours ago

Imagine it not being a bug...

lovich - 4 hours ago

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.

rucury - 6 hours ago

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

cyanydeez - 5 hours ago

someones been dognfooding the AI too muxh

r0ckarong - 5 hours ago

Pff rookie numbers, mine was 375 billion.

tlovage - 6 hours ago

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

aisloper - 41 minutes ago

I blame A.I. usage

kylecazar - 4 hours ago

You didn't have savings opportunities enabled

bdangubic - 4 hours ago

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

endless_smash - 5 hours ago

[dead]

throwaway43871 - 16 minutes ago

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.

jimwilson - an hour ago

[dead]

lostnfound8778 - 4 hours ago

[dead]

GuestFAUniverse - 5 hours ago

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.

blitzar - 4 hours ago

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.

rf15 - 44 minutes ago

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