Most of us feel like we’re in an affordability crisis these days. If you’re like me, you’re helpless and complacent at the checkpoint, even when you feel like you’ve been robbed. But being billed billions or even trillions more than you owe on web hosting will get anyone out of the reach of affordability.
Amazon Web Services users around the world have experienced the following bug:
I saw 1.5 trillion dollars in my AWS account and my soul left my body https://t.co/EgfQKJTHVl pic.twitter.com/L0gXYbDio7
— Bharath (@Bharath_uwu) July 17, 2026
User X named Bharath from India showed the one worth $1,499,659,180,107 and wrote, “My soul has left my body.” This statement says that Bharath’s total this month is up 744,728,201,771%, so by my math, the previous month’s tally was about $200.
According to the GuardianA marketer named Dan Harvey, one educational non-profit organization He said he “almost had a heart attack” after seeing a bill in the U.K. go from 43 cents last month to $7.8 billion this month, and the month isn’t over yet. Harvey added to the Guardian that he had to get on the phone with tech support and “do some real research” to get to the bottom of it. Amazon did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.
This is resolved According to Amazonwrites that on July 16 and 17, “customers received incorrect budget and cost anomaly detection alerts and saw inflated cost and usage estimates in the Billing and Cost Management Console and Cost and Usage Reports.” The amounts are “inaccurate” and “customer invoices were not affected,” Amazon wrote, but everything appears to be back to normal.
Moment Update on Saturday in the AWS service health panel reveals what happened. Apparently, an erroneous “configuration change” was made to the AWS billing system on July 16th. AWS writes, “This system relies on unit conversion data to calculate line item costs, but the change “caused updates to unit conversion data to fail, resulting in inflated line item costs that are propagated to the Billing and Cost Management console and trigger budget and cost anomaly alerts.”
Logs in the health dashboard show that AWS is trying to provide a solution for about two days before noting that the problem is fully resolved.
