Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Your AWS billing estimate might look just a little inflated right now. If you woke up to find an email from Amazon Web Services this morning telling you that you’d gone over your billing threshold by a few hundred million dollars, don’t panic: Something’s gone wrong in the AWS Billing Console, the company admitted. An open …

[Throg]

Vibe coding…?

…so much winning.

[Paul Herber]

Re: Vibe coding…?

VIBE - Very Increased Billing Expenditure

[Anonymous Coward]

Send to c suite immediately, endure their weekends are disturbed

These bills need to be sent to the c suite immediately so they can effectively & expertly manage this issue over the weekend.

Just don’t tell them it’s a billing issue with aws.

This will be their best weekend ever & come Monday they can save their companies billions for all their hard toil!!!

They’ll be trading on these stories for decades.

[EdSaxby]

Re: Send to c suite immediately, endure their weekends are disturbed

No need to interrupt the c suite from their weekend, the AI agent that looks after accounts payable has paid them already.

[bemusedHorseman]

Re: Send to c suite immediately, endure their weekends are disturbed

I bet that was the actual end goal of this "glitch". If even one sufficiently wealthy company is set up to autopay based on estimates, Amazon just made the bonus payday of all time... and even offering billions of dollars in account credits (no refunds, chargebacks denied via bank agreement) will be a rounding error compared to the amount of income they just got from that client.

[Zack Mollusc]

Hmm...

... when this kind of thing happens again, after everyone has sacked their office staff and now have AI settling invoices and running the company, how long will it take to sort out? Will the AI recognise the company is now billions in debt and wind the whole operation up? Will it negotiate a loan of billions from the bank's AI? Will it instantly sell any and all of the company's assets and holdings? How many legal AIs will be instructed and what will their bills look like?

The whole thing may only take seconds. Thank goodness the CEOs implementing all this are competent and farsighted enough to build in safeguards.

[jlturriff]

Re: Hmm...

I think you meant, "...settling invoices and ruining the company..." :-)

[ecofeco]

Will there be penalties?

There will be penalties, right?

Right?

[DS999]

Re: Will there be penalties?

Why would there be penalties for an incorrect billing ESTIMATE?

If it was trying to take that much money out of a bank account that's another matter, but this was a worrying (at worst) or laughable (more likely) if you get an estimate claiming you will owe a couple billion dollars for this month.

[bluejam]

Re: Will there be penalties?

"You requested that we alert you when the actual cost associated with your cost alert budget exceeds $24.00 for the current month. The month actual cost associated with this budget is $184,620,891.12."

ACTUAL COST.

Yes, the amount is a give-away that it is a bug, but the human mind isn't great at interpreting orders of magnitude at the best of times, and even less so at moments of stress. Rationally, I knew it had to be an error. But I certainly wasn't laughing when I saw the email.

[Cruachan]

Broadcom's billing department looking at this and thinking that it sounds like a great idea.

[pro-logic]

Upcoming price leak?

Sounds like maybe someone published upcoming AWS pricing early?

[David 132]

Re: Upcoming price leak?

To be fair to AWS, they just signed a contract to purchase a single matched pair of 32GB DIMMs, and they need to find the money to pay for them. The sums talked about here will get them most of the way there.

[simonlb]

Re: Upcoming price leak?

At that price, I hope they were ECC DIMMs...

[trevorde]

Statement from Amazon

We are sorry for inaccurate usage estimates. These were an underestimate.

[Michael Hoffmann]

Dammit!

I wish I'd been hit with that glitch just to show the missus this months bill for our S3 buckets, rather than our usual $9.95/month.

"Sorry dear, your retirement date got postponed. To about the year 4,347...."

[Wanting more]

A little concerning.

See below for what I was sent, it was a bit worrying until my brain registered just how big the amount was, then it turned to funny. My usual bill is less than a dollar for a few backups in glacier storage. I do worry that my account gets hacked and someone runs up a huge bill like what has happened to others.

"You requested that we alert you when the actual cost associated with your 1 budget budget exceeds $0.16 per day. Yesterday, the actual cost associated with this budget is $14,739,517,604.20. You can find additional details below and by accessing the AWS Budgets dashboard."

[WigglesVonSpiggles]

Savings opportunities

The “Savings opportunities” section was still functioning, which just added to the amusement.

“Hey Boss, it looks like we might spend $4.2 trillion this month on AWS, but fear not - it says we could save $500 a month with a few changes!”.

[Anonymous Coward]

Apology from Amazon

Our AI has been hallucinating your usage

[ravenviz]

Always be wary of 10000 year vendor lock ins!

[breakfast]

I back-of-the-enveloped one of the messages I saw shared and at their normal warning usage level the amount Amazon claimed they had spent would have lasted them for a little over 66,000,000 years - effectively the same time as between the extinction of the dinosaurs and today.

[Anonymous Coward]

So that's where it ended up

British gas ran that software for decades.

[Korev]

Re: So that's where it ended up

Tell Sid!

[thosrtanner]

What on earth does 'the problem has been mitigated' mean? That the estimate is still wildly out but no longer getting more wildly out? If so, why can't they just say that.

[teebie]

"Amazon updated the issue page to indicate that it had identified the root cause "

Was it letting the AI run wild again?