SUMMARYAWS said a billing software bug caused some customers to see wildly inflated estimated charges in Cost Explorer, with some accounts briefly showing bills in the billions or trillions of dollars. The company identified an issue in its estimated billing computation subsystem, paused further estimate updates, and began backfilling corrected data. AWS said all customers should see fixed amounts by Saturday, July 18 at noon Pacific time.
AWS says a billing software bug caused some customers to see wildly inflated estimated charges, including reports of accounts showing bills in the billions or even trillions of dollars. The Register reports: An open issue on the AWS Health Dashboard (archived copy at the time of writing) popped up at 1:33 am Pacific time on Friday informing users that Cost Explorer was "reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data." As of writing, the issue is still unresolved despite AWS trying several different things to get it fixed. The company apparently identified the root cause within an hour and a half of beginning its investigation, only describing it as "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem."
AWS followed up by pausing estimated bill updates, saying customers would continue to see the inflated figures already displayed, but that those estimates would not increase further. "The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges," AWS explained, noting that customers don't need to take any action, like, we imagine, flooding the help portal with tickets telling them what they already know, for instance.
"Once the issue has been mitigated, we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data," AWS added. After we first published this article, Amazon updated the issue page to indicate that it had identified the root cause and mitigated the underlying issue. The company says that it's begun backfilling data in the Cost Management Console to correct billing numbers, and that all customers should see corrected amounts by Saturday, July 18 at noon pacific time.