Ask HN: Any AWS billing issues known? Amazon forecast of 3 billion dollars

105 points by mstolpm 3 hours ago | 53 comments

I receive an AWS Budgets alert that my budget is exceeding the alert threshold. Threshold is 5$. Forecasted amount is listed as $3,005,575,870.47. (Yepp, right, that’s 3 billion dollars.) I haven't even used AWS actively in the last year, but AWS console lists the amount as stated above. No feedback from AWS support yet, but the support AI chat bot says: "Die perfekt gleichmäßigen Tageskosten seit dem 1. Juli deuten stark auf einen Abrechnungs- oder Messfehler hin." ("The perfectly consistent daily costs since July 1 strongly suggest a billing or metering error.") Bot created a support ticket (or at least told me so). Anyone else seeing something like this? Already disabled all AWS IAM roles and deleted all other AWS resources I know of. AWS login not hacked as far as I can tell. But owing Amazon 3 billion dollars is a bit of a concern. Any ideas?

fron 1 hour ago |

Woke up to a billing alarm email. Thought I had leaked my AWS keys accidentally and somehow run up 437 billion dollars of charges. Joke's on them though, I don't have 437 billion dollars

Anyways I didn't need coffee. That produced an adrenaline release unlike any I've experienced before. Thanks AWS

lijok 1 hour ago | |

If you owe AWS 437k bucks, that’s a big problem for you

If you owe AWS 437B bucks, that’s a big problem for AWS

binaryturtle 1 hour ago | |

I wonder how many people may have gotten an actual heart infarct because of that. There may be a person out there that may be dead as a result.

It's entirely irresponsible of Amazon to even display such values to the user.

petercooper 2 minutes ago | | |

Ah, there'll be something in the TOS absolving them of responsibility.

jollyllama 29 minutes ago | | |

Above a bill of a certain amount, the alert should say "Sit down to view."

Hamuko 16 minutes ago | | |

Reminds me of the time a Robinhood user killed themselves after Robinhood erroneously showed their account balance at -$730k.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55990461

trial3 55 minutes ago | |

huge irl laugh at “i don’t have 437 billion dollars”

logicallee 56 minutes ago | |

Worth a shot to give them a call and explain that. They can probably adjust it down to 100 billion.

Cthulhu_ 37 minutes ago | | |

What is this, US health care negotiations?

astonex 1 hour ago |

From their status page

>The second path involves rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem.

Want to bet AI code was involved?

Cthulhu_ 36 minutes ago | |

I'm not a betting person but I am looking forward to the postmortem, whether or not AI was involved, and what their code to production verification stuff looks like now. This kind of thing should have been caught by automated tests.

dvfjsdhgfv 2 minutes ago | | |

There is an enormous amount of money invested in trying to prove the opposite, for this reason not only they will never admit it, they will actively negate AI was used. It happened before:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/24/aws-would-ra...

phyzome 16 minutes ago | |

They'll never admit it.

devin-2030 2 minutes ago | | |

Why would they? Changing colors on the status dashboard needs VP approval.

CarRamrod 46 minutes ago | |

>Spawning Sub-Agent: "Dr. Evil"

a012 58 minutes ago | |

Is it still a bet if you have 99.999% chance to win?

verzali 51 minutes ago | |

Can I bet you 437 billion dollars?

elondaits 1 hour ago |

Woke up to a 100 billion dollars in S3, which is above the USD 4 alarm threshold I had set (I pay $0.55 monthly) . Some AI decided to prune the most impressionable of us.

AngryKitten 1 hour ago |

You folks are completely irresponsible with your finances. I only spent $2.4 million last night. You've got to learn to manage your money.

Cthulhu_ 36 minutes ago | |

Yeah, buy less cappuchinos and avocado toast so you can pay your AWS bills people!

hoppyluke 2 hours ago |

My estimate was only $21M (vs ~$0.01 average bill). Wish I had checked status sooner and saved myself the panic!

My process went: verify email is not phishing (it was), login to console and check dashboard (same amount), attempt to understand cost (cost management kept contradicting itself), try to log support ticket and only on that part did I notice the status notification. At least I can breathe again now!

zengineer 1 hour ago | |

same process, same near heart attack - especially some days ago I had malicious activity on my platform and thought that now they actually found something.

Apparently you can trigger an Action (e.g. prevent uploads) when the billing alert triggers, but then my platform wouldn't work anymore, just because AWS had an issue. Also insane that Amazon still hasn't send an email to clarify.

jwik 2 hours ago |

Yes, there is a known issue with cost estimation.

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

mysterydip 1 hour ago | |

Bit of an understatement: “The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges.”

AngryKitten 1 hour ago | |

Whatever you do, AWS, don't post a related service health alert site wide on the console. Heck, don't even post one in the billing module. We wouldn't want to overdo the alerts, especially when we already have one being displayed to market the new FinOps Agent in Public Preview.

mstolpm 2 hours ago | |

Thank you. Have seen this after I posted.

coffee_is_nom 1 hour ago | | |

Thanks, I panicked logged in and could not find the root cause of the bill.

Thanks AWS, no caffeine needed this morning!

throwatdem12311 1 hour ago |

Hey man AI makes mistakes sometimes that’s why you need to double check the output.

throwaway_5753 2 hours ago |

Scared me even though it was obviously a bug once I stopped to consider the magnitude ($bn). Very unfriendly that they don't allow for hard spend caps; closed my mostly dormant personal account as a result.

largbae 41 minutes ago | |

If they did allow hard spend caps, it sounds like today would be a global outage.

beAbU 8 minutes ago | | |

Well then hopefully next time they'll be a bit more careful when shipping billing code updates!

sailfast 48 minutes ago |

Who is going to compensate us for the years taken off our lives when we received the alerts?

Group_B 29 minutes ago |

Yeah nearly had a heart attack this morning. Thought keys were leaked for a sec.

dpcx 1 hour ago |

My estimate was over 2T. Talk about waking up quickly...

Cthulhu_ 35 minutes ago | |

For science I hope people are trying to figure out now how they could manage to rack up a 2T bill in a month.

_joel 1 hour ago |

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.

fuorilegge 2 hours ago |

I have just received a similar alert for $ 5b

AWS on their support data is reporting this:

Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data

Jul 17 3:03 AM PDT We continue to work to resolve the issue affecting estimated cost and usage data displayed in the Billing and Cost Management Console. We have identified the root cause as an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem and we are working on a mitigation. The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges. There are no customer actions required at this time. Once the issue has been mitigated, we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data. We will provide another update by 4:00 AM PDT or sooner if more information becomes available.

Jul 17 2:07 AM PDT Beginning on July 16 7:38 PM PDT, we began displaying incorrect estimated billing data in the Billing and Cost Management Console. Our engineering teams are engaged and investigating root cause. We will provide another update by 3:00 AM PDT or sooner if more information becomes available.

Jul 17 1:33 AM PDT We are investigating issues with Cost Explorer reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data.

alfiedotwtf 1 hour ago |

Vibe Billing

lordleft 59 minutes ago |

Got a message that I owe 37 million on an account that I haven't used in probably...6 years?

HarHarVeryFunny 1 hour ago |

They should have added "make no mistakes" to the prompt.

themgt 1 hour ago |

"If you owe AWS a hundred thousand dollars, that's your problem. If you owe AWS three billion dollars, that's Amazon's problem."

gioazzi 1 hour ago |

Heard of somebody who got 19 quadrillion dollars - I thought they meant Zimbabwean dollars

elashri 54 minutes ago | |

one USD is about 362 Zimbabwean dollars. So it would still be about ~53 trillion dollars which is more than the nominal GDP of US and China combined.

Polizeiposaune 22 minutes ago | | |

For history here, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe redenominated its currency three times in 2006, 2008, and 2009, dropping a total of 25 trailing zeros in the process. the 4th Zimbabwean dollar in 2009 was worth 10^25 of the first zimbabwean dollar.

Waterluvian 57 minutes ago | |

That would have been a great deal!

tedk-42 1 hour ago |

far out it's 10pm here and I was just about to sleep when my wife nugged me about a billing alert from AWS.

$151 billion the number for me.

ohnoooooooooo 57 minutes ago |

Did it recover for you folks? I still see billions of dollars!

dvh 1 hour ago |

Prompt: bill our aws customers, make no mistakes.

vel0city 49 minutes ago | |

Prompt: investigate new ways to fund additional AI datacenters.

zengineer 1 hour ago | |

or: Increase revenue!

Cthulhu_ 34 minutes ago | | |

I mean just overcharging is one approach to achieving that goal I suppose.

But so is imprisoning or exterminating all humans for their own good, as most AI dystopias end up as.

ownagefool 1 hour ago |

Mines was $190,594,974,587,761.20 :)

gib444 1 hour ago |

Maybe they accidentally used the Argentine peso ;)

_joel 1 hour ago | |

Less hyper-scaler, more hyper-inflation

ohnoooooooooo 58 minutes ago |

did it recover for you? I still see billions

aweiland 20 minutes ago | |

Mine has

th3o6a1d 1 hour ago |

131 billion for me