A glitch at Amazon’s cloud services division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), left consumers all over the world with bills that would bankrupt even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
According to a post on X, first spotted by The Guardian, a user in India named Bharath got hit with a particularly astounding bill.
“I just saw $1.5tn on my AWS bill and my soul left my body,” he told his followers.
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Dan Harvey, who leads marketing at UK company Learning Through Landscapes, found that his cloud hosting bill had skyrocketed from 43 cents to $7.8 billion, a jump of roughly 1.8 trillion percent.
He told The Guardian he “almost had a heart attack” when he received the notification.
Meanwhile, one user on Reddit said his bill was over $7 trillion, higher than the GDP of the UK and Canada combined.
Amazon confirmed that the bills were mistaken in a post on X earlier today, and users were not expected to take any action to correct the issue. Amazon confirmed it was working on fixing the problem, but that it may take some time for the bills to show up correctly in user’s accounts.
The tech giant didn’t give many hints as to the true cause of the fault, but according to Amazon’s Service Health page, the issue was due to a problem “affecting estimated cost and usage data displayed in the Billing and Cost Management Console, including the Cost and Usage Report.”
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If you’d like to prevent issues like this from happening in the future, AWS CEO Matt Garman has gone on record to say that the division will continue to hire developers amid the AI boom, and that demand is “really accelerating”. It plans to hire 10,000 this year.
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