On Friday, some Amazon cloud customers woke up to a surprise bill that said they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they never used.
Amazon confirmed on Friday that it is working to fix a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers “owed” millions or billions in cloud computing costs.
one update on the status pageAmazon said it started seeing inaccurate billing data on Thursday. But on Friday morning, the company admitted that “reverting the last change did not fix the problem.” Amazon said the change is related to its computing subsystem.
The good news for customers who are said to “owe” Amazon millions or billions is probably off the hook. Billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to a few screenshots Posted on Reddit by Amazon customersone customer was quoted as estimating a bill of around $2.5 billion for this month’s AWS usage, while others had similar warnings ranging from several million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.
An Amazon spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Amazon’s status page says the issue is expected to continue for several more hours.
