Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers around the world have been alarmed by invoices running into billions and even trillions of dollars, after a global glitch caused severe errors in the company's billing system. The erroneous charges, which appeared on Friday, left many users facing amounts wildly out of proportion to their normal monthly costs.
One British customer, Dan Harvey, head of marketing at the Hampshire-based charity Learning Through Landscapes, said he "almost had a heart attack" when he saw a bill of $7.8bn (£5.8bn) for his school grounds audit app, which usually costs less than £1 a month. He described the panic of trying to find out what had gone wrong with the charity's account.
Other users reported similar experiences. A social media user named Bharath posted a screenshot showing his usage had increased by 745,728,201,771% and his bill stood at $1.5tn. Sachin, a student in Delhi who usually pays $1.28 a month, was billed $10.9bn. Andrea Zuvich, a historian from Bolsover, Derbyshire, who runs a website called The Seventeenth Century Lady, recounted a "horrible half hour of extreme stress" after receiving a bill for $245bn, compared with her usual $15 monthly charge.
The glitch began at 3.38am UK time on Friday, according to AWS. The company later apologised "for any confusion and concern around these costs" and said it had identified "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem". It then shut off the bill estimation system while it worked on a fix, warning that full resolution could take several hours.
Amazon Web Services is the world's largest cloud services provider, serving millions of customers from small businesses and charities to large corporations. The erroneous bills sparked widespread anxiety on social media, with one user joking: "Good morning to everyone enjoying their heart attacks." AWS has yet to confirm whether any customers were actually charged the incorrect amounts.
