Some Amazon cloud customers woke up Friday to shocking bill estimates saying they owed billions of dollars for cloud services they never used.
Amazon acknowledged Friday that it is working to resolve a bug in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) billing portal that showed some customers were “owing” millions or even billions of dollars in cloud computing costs.
Amazon said in an update to its status page that it began seeing inaccurate billing data late Thursday. But by Friday morning, the company acknowledged that “rolling back recent changes did not resolve the issue.” Amazon said the change is related to its billing calculation subsystem.
That's good news for customers who have been told they “owe” Amazon millions or billions. Billing estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” Amazon said.
According to several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit, one customer had an estimated bill of nearly $2.5 billion for AWS usage this month, while other customers had similar alerts, ranging from millions to hundreds of millions of dollars.
An Amazon spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. The issue is expected to continue for several more hours, according to Amazon's status page.