Some Amazon Web Services customers say they almost had heart attacks Friday after getting bills big enough to bankrupt Elon Musk. Users who typically pay pocket change for the company's cloud services instead saw eye-watering charges in the billions and even trillions of dollars thanks to a global billing malfunction, the Guardian reports. "I just saw $1.5tn on my AWS bill and my soul left my body," one user said on X, sharing a screenshot of a bill that said his usage had increased by more that 740 billion percent. Dan Harvey at British charity Learning Through Landscapes says he went into "full panic mode" after receiving an alert saying the bill for an app had gone from 43 cents to $7.8 billion.
- Andrea Zuvich, a British historian who runs The Seventeenth Century Lady website, tells the Guardian she had a "horrible half hour of extreme stress" after learning that her bill had hit $245 billion. "Our usual bills are around $15 a month. You can imagine we were pretty surprised," she says. "In a more serious note, this may have alarmed some people very greatly, and even have caused health issues."
Amazon said customers didn't need to cough up billions of dollars or take any other action. The company said the surreal totals stemmed from a problem in "unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem" that began late Thursday, adding that the massive bills "do not reflect actual usage and charges,"
TechCrunch reports. Amazon disabled its estimated billing feature and apologized for the "confusion and concern." In an
update around 10am Friday, Amazon said it had "identified the root cause and mitigated the underlying issue."
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