alt Hacker NewsAWS: Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data – $1.7 billion
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...
Comments
I've had a mysterious Neptune cluster appear on my billing. Never used it, no API key access (or IAM instance profile access, OIDC etc), nothing in my console shows I've ever had one in any region. Raised a case with support, they ignored it.
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.
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.
They have to pay for that AI Capex buildout somehow
I saw another post on reddit with something like a hundred trillion dollar bill. I wish I had saved that link to share it, the comments were quite comical!
Yes, I've got an estimated bill of $4bn. Probably related to the ongoing "Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data" incident?
I was actually in the toilet when I got an email I owe them $36,869,876,146.51. I literally just shit myself.
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.
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.
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?
> Anyone else seeing something like this?
You can use the search box at the bottom of every page to search for previous posts.
This was posted an hour before you posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945241
""" 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.
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...
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.
I made something that tries to highlight the humor regarding this:
AWS revenue for 2025 was $128.7 billion, so I'd say probably a bug.
If I can expect to be penalized for not paying my legitimate bills, companies should also be penalized for failing to implement common-sense reasonable safeguards that prevent them from slapping their consumers with such absurdities.
Good news is you finally qualify for Enterprise Support and you've never been closer to a Series B.
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 ?
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
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
Thank you so much! I just woke up, and saw budget alert email for a dormant account to use $434,896.90. I haven't gotten so awake so fast in such a long time.
$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.
Just got a budget alert that I owe $286,486,223.88 on a hobby aws account, almost got a heart attack.
Just pay it and move on. No need to cause a scene.
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.
Given the wild but apparently "consistent" numbers I wonder if we could reverse-engineer the wrong algorithm with enough data points? Maybe the proper cost estimate has some relationship to the reported cost estimate.
Vibe Billing
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.
Should have used Fable.
Yes, an incident is ongoing https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
At some point my role was to reduce our startup’s AWS bill. I managed to keep 7 figures on our books instead of handing it to AWS. But a message like that would have given me a heart attack in those days.
Long story short: it saved the company from irrelevance. “Well-architected” is for the hyperscalers’ balance sheet, not yours.
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!
I just deleted my aws account. I don't need these vibes in my life.
Lol, Friday deployment is a bad omen even with LLM. Some things are just unchangeable facts of life.
THis is why I hate API/usage pricing
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?
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Looks like this is a bug w/ S3
Need some money for a new Launchpad
I seem to have spend >35trilion on rds today, sooo yeah, going great at AWS
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.
You're not working hard enough if your AWS bill isn't $1.7B.
In moments like these I'm reminded of all the people who have committed suicide due to billing errors. This is completely unacceptable. These sorts of errors must _never_ happen.
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.
Looks like they set up a LLM to estimate billing?