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donavanm 9 hours ago [-]
Ive dealt with this error at AWS. It’s a unit error. In my case we _meant_ to charge like 5¢/GB, but missed the unit (GB), and then the billing system defaults to bytes. 5¢ per Byte of data transferred meant some customers were seeing MM bills within hours. Got paged by support around 2am, had it fixed and amendments issues by 3-4am, apology emails shortly after.
Services emit metering values that arent directly tied to prices. Every SKU/line item is defined in a “pricing plan”, with a unit type, regions, and price per unit. The metering records are joined to a pricing plan based on account id, region, sku, etc. mess up the unit type in the pricing plan and the metering data conversion doesnt work, and you get crazy bills.
01284a7e 9 hours ago [-]
No tests? Just mess up some mundane detail [1] and voila! Wake-up calls and heart attacks for 100,000s of administrators?
There will have been tests, but there will have been missing end-to-end tests. Test 1 will verify that the new system/product emits billing entries in some expected way ("We did 100 bytes of operations and we see we called the billing system for 100 bytes of stuff, yay, test pass"). Test 2 will be in the billing system ("We provide an incoming bill for SKU#12345 for 100 gigabyte-units and we see it costs $17, yay, test passes"). But they won't test the two things together because it will be harder to do and the teams will have different management chains. Seen it happen several times at several companies. Somebody will have said at some point "we should actually have the tests charge money" and somebody else will have said "well we can't have the tests actually charge money, that's a legal/accounting problem, it might even be a crime" and then nobody would have asked what the next best thing was.
skissane 3 hours ago [-]
> Somebody will have said at some point "we should actually have the tests charge money" and somebody else will have said "well we can't have the tests actually charge money, that's a legal/accounting problem, it might even be a crime" and then nobody would have asked what the next best thing was.
If you support multicurrency billing, then have the tests bill a test customer in XTS (ISO 4217 code for test currency).
qeternity 4 hours ago [-]
But these aren't the right services where the test should be, right?
There's another service that says "ok we take the 100 bytes from A, and we take the $17 SKU from B, and this should equal $X".
It's the third service that multiplies these things that failed. Where are the tests for that?
DrewADesign 4 hours ago [-]
To me this sounds like a human-or-LLM-driven error. There must be a pretty limited set of factors that determine a pricing unit: I’m not really sure how a deterministic system could do that infrequently enough to not be a bigger story. Maybe a reeeeaaaallly rare race condition or something like that? To me this smells like having enough manual work involved in the process to fuck something up, but not nearly enough eyes on it to notice.
I’m totally guessing though.
akdev1l 8 hours ago [-]
Not even tests but just some basic anomaly detection lol.
Like maybe if the bill amounts increase by like 10M% there should be someone that looks into it
qurren 8 hours ago [-]
You overestimate how much people give shits at big techs like Amazon. When literally everything is driven with sticks instead of carrots, the work culture does not invite employees to proactively care about product quality.
You'd be better off letting the heart attacks happen and take the 3am on-call and be the hero instead. It would be good promo doc material, and being a hero is extremely good insurance against getting kicked out of the country (via the PIP->H1B grace period expiry mechanism).
mightyham 7 hours ago [-]
Speaking from my experience at Amazon this is not the case. Any customer impact like this would necessitate a COE (correction of errors) report, which means a list of required action items to prevent such issues from happening again, which typically suck up at least man-month of labor. Not to mention the report itself, which has to be written by a manager.
In fact, there are regular AWS-wide meetings where L10 technical staff will randomly pick and review reports from across the organization. Getting picked for one of these is not a fun experience.
COEs are such a huge annoyance for teams that they create a strong incentive to be proactive in preventing issues like this from happening. One of the rules when it comes to writing COEs is that they are not the fault of individuals but processes; but in reality, no one wants to be the cause of one.
eventualcomp 6 hours ago [-]
Amazon is heterogeneous. So much so, that positive anecdotes and negative anecdotes are near worthless without specifying the org.
Depending on if you're a cost cutting team, fixed expense team or organization, if you're a revenue driving team, or if you're a core team, or the very many other splits you can come up about the relationship between the expense/balance sheets and the team itself...there are very very different attitudes towards COEs and leadership principles.
smallerize 14 minutes ago [-]
> > everything is driven with sticks instead of carrots
> this is not the case
> [describes all sticks and no carrots]
awakeasleep 5 hours ago [-]
Having been the manager writing those reports, you can only practically find causes that are within a single team’s ability to resolve.
If you find a problem like this thread’s hypothetical, the process stops being an annoyance just to line level managers, and something that directors and vice presidents need to handle by changing strategic priorities within their organizations.
That entails a real loss of face for them, and because they are the ones who actually run the show, it would will only happen if you have one that is naïve or a masochist. In either case that moves them out of management.
qurren 4 hours ago [-]
From the manager's side, you're absolutely correct. The SEV looks bad on you, and is a headache to document.
From the perspective of people you manage, it's a very different picture.
We (I say "we", because I was an IC) sit under you, and every year at performance review time you're effectively required to put some percentage of us in the "LE" bucket. Never mind that we could theoretically all HV3+ if you measure by "normal" peoples' standards, your manager isn't going to let you mark all of us as HV3 at the performance meetings. I know this, because I've been there as well at those meetings where truly high performing people were downrated to fit a distribution.
So what happens? When I see a peer's critical lurking bug, I have no incentive to fix it for the sake of prevention. If I fix it quietly so that it never surfaces, it looks like I haven't done any work for the week, or have done un-impactful work, and I get the stick from you. Preventing fires doesn't look like work, to non-technical eyes.
The only "safe" way to play this game of "survivor" is to let that bug surface eventually, then when the SEV comes up, I jump in and fix it, earning your approval, skip approval, VP approval, as well as potentially the other person gets the stick from you, because you have to give the stick to someone anyway, you get a reason to stick it on them. At least it's not getting stuck on me.
I'm sorry if this comes off as shocking to you, but it really shouldn't; the incentive structure is NOT set up for teamwork, plain and simple. If "putting customers first" is a value, then it absolutely needs to start from systematic changes of how people are managed.
3 hours ago [-]
nullorempty 8 hours ago [-]
This ^^^ amplified by indifference and not giving a shit caused by "AI Adoption".
There is literally no fucking reason to try to improve your skill. Any IDIOT with AI will do an OK job.
And no one is shooting for better than OK.
tyre 8 hours ago [-]
Are you speaking from experience or simply making things up? I know a fair number of former AWS engineers and managers. None of them think like this.
mendigou 7 hours ago [-]
I am former AWS and this is pretty accurate.
The other factor to add here is that, with some exceptions, the whole company feels like a Rube Goldberg machine and very few people care about what happens outside their cog (because they’re not incentivized to do so).
akdev1l 4 hours ago [-]
Rube Goldberg machine attached with used bubble gum and somehow the bubblegum was chewed in all the wrong ways
zelphirkalt 8 hours ago [-]
Maybe they are former AWS employees for a reason and now want things to go better than they were at AWS.
nullsanity 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
geodel 8 hours ago [-]
"Former" seems to an important detail here.
switchbak 7 hours ago [-]
If I worked at a place like that, I'd sure as hell work my butt of to get a job somewhere else.
Or in my case, actively ignore any and all recruiting from that sesspool.
gleenn 7 hours ago [-]
If someone quits their job, do all their opinions suddenly become suspect? You're kind of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't. Either you work for the company and you are biased one way, or you quit and now your bias is now suddenly the other way. I've joined and quit many jobs and my opinion may or may not have changed due to my change in status but it is clearly and ad hominem attack.
FabCH 6 hours ago [-]
Not the OP, but:
The point was not that their opinion is suspect, the point was that they are former because people who care about the customer get fired and/or that everyone who cared is former, so nobody who is left cares.
qurren 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, I am a former AWS employee.
I got put on Focus because my "contributions were not coming through" to leadership.
thewebguyd 6 hours ago [-]
> take the 3am on-call and be the hero instead
Ah yes, the good old ITism "Everything's good, what are we even paying you for?" followed by "Everything's on fire, what are we even paying you for?"
I moved out of it largely for that reason, am now an infrastructure/IT project manager, quite refreshing actually.
qurren 5 hours ago [-]
The trick to surviving under such management is to jump in and put out other peoples' fires but not spend time preventing them even if you know how to.
dice 5 hours ago [-]
How did you swing that transition? Did you study for PMP before applying around, leverage network to get in the door then backfill skills, or what?
thewebguyd 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I got my PMP before applying around, combined with some luck I suppose. My IT role was basically a solo sysadmin before where I basically was the technical PM + engineer in one, and I did that for about 8 years so I had a ton of experience I could spin on my resume.
mcpherrinm 7 hours ago [-]
While I didn't work on AWS, I did intern on the retail side of Amazon, and there's definitely this sort of monitoring in place. Surely somebody was paged. And even if not, this is "just" the cost explorer estimations, not what is ending up on folk's bills.
I've been told a tale of another incident where some customer ran some huge cpu-intensive workload that didn't do any networking. It caused various alarms to fire because it "looked like" a part of the network was idle (potentially indicating some sort of networking failure)
It's generally (in the broad sense) easy to add alarms for things going wrong, but in my experience anomaly detectors are just as likely to fire from other weird things like that happening.
dclowd9901 3 hours ago [-]
Clearly some folks here have never worked at Amazon before. It's genuinely terrifying to see what most of the internet runs on.
el1s7 5 hours ago [-]
I think billing is the only thing AWS doesn't really care about optimizing or putting enough tests to avoid anomalies lol.
Groxx 6 hours ago [-]
They've already got anomaly detection: their users.
01284a7e 8 hours ago [-]
If only there was some way to get anomaly detection services [1] inside of AWS...
Earlier this week my slopservant implemented several comprehensive changes to a codebase.
It also wrote extensive tests to verify the correctness of the changes.
A few days later I was working on something else and realized, everything had been implemented backwards, in a way that was nonsensical and also completely pointless.
The many tests it had written were just confirming the LLM's idea of correctness, which turned out to be... completely incorrect.
I laughed when I realized, if I had been using Rust, or indeed, formal verification, that wouldn't have helped at all — it would have just written a mathematical proof, proving the correctness of the wrong thing!
Not sure what lesson to take from that (except read the damn diffs, obviously — it was a hobby project okay ;), but it seems like the more reliable this stuff gets, the more we expect it to work properly, the more risky it becomes.
We have a pretty strong existence proof... the thing happened in production. Unless they have some means to override a failing test and scp broken shit to prod, there wasn't a test.
chasd00 6 hours ago [-]
why would a test setting unit to Bytes fail and not MB, KB, or GB, and so on? That's like trying create a unit test for email opt-in, both true and false are valid values. It's up to the user to select the right one.
27183 6 hours ago [-]
I'm not quite following your objection.. I'd expect a test that checks the multiplier is correct would detect orders of magnitude discrepancy. So if you're billing $x/byte you'd write a test for the billing thing that checks that, given y bytes, the bill is x*y.
[edit] This may need to be an integration test to be effective, there is a certain peril to mocking that could bite you here. But that's fine, we have the technology.
8note 4 hours ago [-]
missing canaries more likely?
insufficient tests that dont assert on the right things?
the existence of a test doesnt mean it catches the right thing
based on the description, id bet the COE action item will be to do a migration that enforces units are passed at the billing service level
theres no good reason for the billing service to make up its own units.
27183 4 hours ago [-]
Yeah types and APIs that are difficult to misuse are way better than any regression test, canary, or what have you. Systems that are correct by construction always beat "you're holding it wrong".
nullorempty 7 hours ago [-]
Technically, there could be a test. It could just be wrong!
27183 7 hours ago [-]
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it...
[edit] Testing your tests, like testing your backups, is a good idea
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, test the negative case as well. eg if you get the system setup so you can log in, also make sure you get permission denied for bad login info.
vasco 4 hours ago [-]
I'm sorry but anyone that sees a multi million or billion dollar bill on an account that does nowhere near that should not be scared. It's obviously a mistake. Stories like this have happened with banks in my country. Check your account and you have billions in there. Guess what happened to those that withdrew money? The judge told them any reasonable person would know this is a bug. Had to give it back. Same thing here, any reasonable person doesn't get scared.
yawaramin 2 hours ago [-]
The problem with an anomalous AWS bill is that I don't know if it's because of a bug on their end or because of a goof on my end, eg did I accidentally leave on some giant compute for a month or something. With a billion in my bank account I at least know that I definitely didn't put it in there.
simmerup 3 hours ago [-]
I’d be concerned as it throws into doubt their entire accounting mechanism
Twirrim 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder if AWS billing still uses CSV files for passing data around.
IIRC it was one of my first on-calls at AWS over a decade ago now, and I got a page early evening because some stuff we did with billing records broke because some "smart" engineer thought it'd be a great idea to put an experimental record in with a description something like "I wonder what happens if I put, a comma in this field", into the production record. I watched region after region fail the same way as the record spread. That one engineer made a mess of lots of people's evenings. They could have used the test endpoint, but no. Much better to test in production!
anvuong 5 hours ago [-]
That was just a massive operational failure, not the fault of any single engineer. No change, except hotfixes, should be able to land on prod unless it has at least go through test, staging, and at the scale of Amazon, shadow testing.
Engineers will do what engineers will always want to do, they want to see how things break, and sometimes they manage to fix it.
Twirrim 2 hours ago [-]
Sure, and I would expect the COE called out the operational aspects. No one should have been in a position to be able to trigger that bug trivially (I don't remember if it came from a service, or if they injected the metering record themselves somehow, or quite what. Way too long ago for that)
Most engineers with more than a few years of experience know better than to directly try a stunt like that in production, but they do often get there through painful personal experience. I just wish I hadn't been one of the many that got to suffer from that engineer choosing to learn at that particular moment!
mrwh 4 hours ago [-]
Kinda want to push back on that. It's not like engineers are separate from operations, not really. A lot of operations is just what engineers have been socialised to do.
donavanm 50 minutes ago [-]
It was the same old kona files for metering until at least a ‘23-24 when I last did metering/pricing work. “Luckily” the size of the EC2 pricing plan was so stupidly large that it was forcing improvements to how those were serialized, and how private pricing plans were created/assigned to different payer ids.
hotstickyballs 6 hours ago [-]
CSV files are widely known to be used by the most frugal companies so of course it is.
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
Have you seen what RDS costs‽ AWS couldn't possibly afford that!
sscaryterry 6 hours ago [-]
This isn't a flippant comment. Imagine though, being presented with this. Imagine having some underlying health problem (e.g. cardiovascular).
Do not be surprised if real people actually die from this mistake, from the anxiety, the surprise, the helplessness.
shermantanktop 4 hours ago [-]
But someone that susceptible is likely going to have a bad reaction to many possible unexpected things. How would they react to a minor traffic accident? a family member getting hurt? a letter from tax authorities asking questions?
Having that serious an underlying health problem means everyday life represents risk for you. I don't think that means everyone else has to behave differently wrt (in this case wrt to billing mistakes) to keep you healthy.
8note 4 hours ago [-]
its so far out as to be obviously not real
a smaller error by say, just one or two orders of magnitude are much more believable as a reader
sscaryterry 4 hours ago [-]
I've seen people have panic attacks over much smaller amounts.
Just because you've not seen it or cannot fathom it happening in your world doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
insane_dreamer 2 hours ago [-]
actually $17B isn't so bad because it's so obviously an error and not something you can fatfinger. if you expected it to be $17 and it was $17,000 you'd be much more worried as that looks like a plausible error on your part
jhickok 44 minutes ago [-]
Yeah that's what I was thinking. And if someone sent me a bill for 17 billion I would just tell them I don't have it and never will, sorry.
edelbitter 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
nurettin 8 hours ago [-]
This is why I always fail loud rather than pick a stupid default.
QuinnyPig 5 hours ago [-]
Was this the day that gp3 EBS volumes came out by any chance?
crossroadsguy 8 hours ago [-]
Had it been half a million dollars or something or say like a few hundred dollars?
dev_l1x_be 6 hours ago [-]
Imagine a programming language that has physical measurement unit support so this could have never happened.
"I must've put a decimal point in the wrong place or something. I always mess up some mundane detail."
AlotOfReading 8 hours ago [-]
Unit mistakes happen all the time, which is why you should be using your units library religiously and still being vigilant even then.
Worst case I've found was off by 15 orders of magnitude.
cyberax 1 hours ago [-]
One of my personal rules is to ALWAYS suffix the variables and fields with unit names:
`timeout_ms` or `rate_kbps`, NOT `timeout` or `rate`.
Unless the variable type already constrains it (e.g. Duration in Go).
markus_zhang 7 minutes ago [-]
This also helps downstream a lot.
zapkyeskrill 7 hours ago [-]
Degrees, very funny.
27183 7 hours ago [-]
It's not difficult to write regression tests that catch unit mistakes.
gleenn 7 hours ago [-]
One of the Mars landers famously failed due to unit conversion errors from metric to standard.
blemasle 7 hours ago [-]
I didn't know the imperial system was named "standard". Funny, cause its everything but standard both internationally and its definitions (which are not standard as based on SI)
Dan_- 6 hours ago [-]
I know you’re being snarky, but the US system is not “imperial” anyway. It’s properly “US Customary” but is often called “US Standard.”
fc417fc802 6 hours ago [-]
Claiming something isn't standard because it isn't based on SI is entirely circular in the case of weights and measures.
That said I wish the US would bite the bullet and make the switch. Mandating dual labeling on everything would be a great start. Then in 20 years we could narrow it back down to one.
reddalo 5 hours ago [-]
You just need to start teaching kids the metric system. Then when they'll grow up the switch will almost magically happen by itself.
AlotOfReading 2 hours ago [-]
All of my science classes in the rural US from middle school onward were taught entirely in metric, and it had been that way for decades prior. Obviously I'm an adult now, and metric still isn't universal.
golem14 7 hours ago [-]
Wasn't it (also?) the Ariane V flight in 1996? Oh, NVM, that was an overflow error.
anvuong 5 hours ago [-]
Multiple rockets exploded and space missions failed because of the imperial vs. metric BS, and those mistakes were made by people all with PhDs or equivalences. This is still pretty mild in comparison haha.
Units and datetime will always be the bane of any professions ...
yuchen20 15 hours ago [-]
I got 3 consecutive emails warning that my budget crossed its $18 threshold. Opened it up: cost was 78 million. Thought it was a phishing attempt, logged into my actual account, and... still 78 million. EMOTIONAL DAMAGE.
root-parent 11 hours ago [-]
Wanna bet the description of this job post will be updated by the end of the day?
"...Our platforms are powered by generative AI, large language models, knowledge graphs, and agentic architectures that dynamically compose specialized agents based on context. We apply these capabilities across three reinforcing areas: intelligent launch readiness — where autonomous AI agents analyze, generate, and validate the information needed to go
live in a new market; cloud-native service orchestration — where configuration-driven microservices replace per-launch bespoke engineering with centralized, reusable capabilities so that expanding into a new country becomes a zero-code configuration change rather than a development cycle; and continuous validation..."
ibejoeb 11 hours ago [-]
Wow:
In this role you will:
- Design and build agentic AI systems that analyze, generate, and validate...
- Build agentic architectures that compose specialized AI agents dynamically...
- Build AI-driven continuous validation frameworks powered by agentic workflows and large language models that autonomously manage...
This is invoicing? If ever there was a domain that was purely deterministic, you'd hope it was invoicing.
root-parent 11 hours ago [-]
The irony is, the only purely deterministic thing, will be token consumption...
jdiff 11 hours ago [-]
I severely doubt the world ever gets to such a point that the entire world melts into AI hallucination. And token consumption depends on so many other things, it's not all that deterministic either.
serf 10 hours ago [-]
(token usage) is trending towards predictability for a lot of reasons. it's not deterministic but it's getting easier to reason about usage.
I’m not so sure about that. I can see a real rationale for creating sanity checks using AI to more quickly/proactively catch pathological billing issues before they become HN nightmare stories. They wouldn’t replace billing code, but there are many ways that stupid customer mistakes can cause real costs to Amazon that either have to be refunded and absorbed by Amazon or paid by the customer causing a negative opinion of AWS. If a billing AI watching costs in realtime could detect, say, a lambda loop in the first 10 min and either alert the customer or kill it, that would make AWS feel a lot safer to use. Enumerating these conditions and fixing them individually is a task that Amazon has proven incapable of achieving. An AI watchdog layer might be the perfect shortcut to addressing all of these problems at once. Because it’s well-trodden territory that AWS has so many multi-thousand dollar foot guns that make it really scary to use as a hobbyist or small business on a tight budget.
hvb2 8 hours ago [-]
> I can see a real rationale for creating sanity checks using AI to more quickly/proactively catch pathological billing issues before they become HN nightmare stories
Right, so invoicing is still a deterministic problem. You can bolt whatever on but in the end it's just product x price x units
skywhopper 5 hours ago [-]
This is exactly the sort of thing that’s not possible, though. An AI will not be able to detect a “lambda loop” because it will look exactly like a “successful lambda rollout”. This sort of watchdog would just as likely shut down the wrong things and make AWS feel a lot less safe.
golly_ned 4 hours ago [-]
When I was at AWS, they famously required an extensive "CoE", correction of errors, or post-mortem, in an instance of over-charging a customer $0.26.
The idea is that if we can make small billing mistakes like that, we can make large billing mistakes, and need to invest in the correctness of the systems powering billing.
I have great respect for the engineering culture within AWS during those times. I am glad to have left before seeing it degrade and decline.
londons_explore 9 hours ago [-]
Probably not actually. Transferring one kilobyte across a network link has such a low value that the billing costs of aggregating it cost more than the revenue.
So instead you take a probabilistic approach - charge the user for a megabyte of data transfer 0.1% of the time, and bill nothing 99.9% of the time.
Now the typical cost is the same, the users bill is probably accurate to the cent, but you have divided the number of billing records by 1000.
svobodovic 7 hours ago [-]
I don't know how cloud services count usage, but this is certainly not true for telco. I manage several fleets of hundreds/thousands of SIM cards (mostly IoT/M2M applications), and almost every provider counts the data traffic per byte. Different business and use case, I know, but still.
michaelmrose 8 hours ago [-]
The way you describe requires somehow counting every bit but somehow discarding most which is obviously nonsense.
This seems statistically invalid insofar as it will tend to overbill potentially by a lot on the minority of cases.
Don't you know how much of the pipe is occupied by a given customers code at any given time or what data is being sent
londons_explore 6 hours ago [-]
You have to do it when the customer list is too big to keep a counter per customer.
fc417fc802 6 hours ago [-]
A probabilistic counter per customer is also a counter per customer. Still, probabilistic billing is an amusing thought though.
michaelmrose 6 hours ago [-]
No you don't
TJSomething 7 hours ago [-]
This is like half of all job listings I've read recently. And it's a decent amount of fintech that's like this.
blitzar 10 hours ago [-]
> 194,400.00 USD annually
Fuck it, im in.
TheOtherHobbes 7 hours ago [-]
Just wait until the same system runs payroll and you're getting paid $1.94400 annually.
blitzar 7 hours ago [-]
I will just tell the HR bot that I am meant to be paid 1.944 billion.
sgarland 7 hours ago [-]
10/10, no notes.
fragmede 5 hours ago [-]
That's base, don't forget bonus and stock.
redbell 1 hours ago [-]
IRE which stands for Invoice Reliability Engineer.
sebmellen 11 hours ago [-]
That job description feels so far beyond parody that I could scarcely believe it until opening the link! What a world.
"We're transforming from monthly batch processing and manual war rooms to continuous billing, autonomous agents, and self-healing infrastructure. We believe operational burden is a technical problem, not a staffing problem"
This looks clearly...a staffing problem...
ghurtado 10 hours ago [-]
> This looks clearly...a staffing problem..
I think that big tech recently decided that I got 99 problems but staffing ain't one
I guess Nothing is a staffing problem when you make a rule that firing people is always the solution.
wbl 10 hours ago [-]
If you can make the software cover the toil you save the staff for the tough cases.
quickthrowman 9 hours ago [-]
They need to fire whoever is running AP and AP software development. Vibe invoicing is ridiculous for anyone to do, let alone Amazon.
11 hours ago [-]
iam-TJ 10 hours ago [-]
The best bit of that is:
> In this role, you will own end-to-end bill run execution across all AWS partitions, drive the technical vision for autonomous billing operations, and build the team that ensures every customer receives an accurate cost estimated in minutes ...
LPisGood 9 hours ago [-]
Seriously! If I were making a joke I would say something like
> Build AI-driven continuous validation frameworks powered by agentic workflows and large language models that autonomously manage…
But that’s word for word a 250k+ TC job in the big ‘26.
paganel 10 hours ago [-]
> enabling domain experts to review in hours what previously took weeks.
This is a gold-mine. They need to get sued heavily for this incompetence.
rcleveng 11 hours ago [-]
I did too, those awstrack.me URL's look super suspicious and I hadn't seen this alert trigger before so didn't know what to expect.
At first I was sure it was a phishing attempt. Then went to the console (not using those links)
Saw there was an outage where the console was wrong (no mention of email alerts)
Then I thought I was hacked - what a perfect cover up for someone to evade detection when the console was wrong.
Looked at some logs, realized the incident text was just not exhaustive on the impact.
Went back to my cup of coffee.
Note to self- should have looked here first.
shawkinaw 3 hours ago [-]
Mine was just over $1 billion. I thought the email was a phish at first and almost trashed it, but it seemed otherwise very real, so I logged in to AWS just to check. Then I almost had a heart attack when I looked at my billing estimate. Eventually I saw a banner on the support page, but my question is why wasn’t there a banner on the page SAYING I OWE A BILLION DOLLARS?!
jayanmn 10 hours ago [-]
Enterprise account . We got - 3trillion and change
theflyingelvis 9 hours ago [-]
3.7 billion. Offered to pay it in monthly installments. Haven’t hears back
chii 10 hours ago [-]
-$3 trillion! That's the highest earning investment that has ever existed!
idiotsecant 10 hours ago [-]
Quick do your IPO before the books update
munk-a 6 hours ago [-]
It's true, if you're spending that much money you must be worth a ton! Just look at SpaceX!
rconti 5 hours ago [-]
same. over 2t in one day.
antognini 6 hours ago [-]
To paraphrase the old joke, if you wake up with a $78,000 AWS bill, you have a problem. If you wake up with a $78 million AWS bill, Amazon has a problem.
jerf 1 hours ago [-]
The real fun comes later when the US Federal Government taxes us on the forgiven debt as income.
corvad 6 hours ago [-]
Please do not open up emails directly always login to your account.
01284a7e 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, I am taking legal action, no doubt.
bot403 8 hours ago [-]
Why? What's the damages? They showed you a wrong number, then later acknowledged it and fixed it. Just because the number was "very big" to you doesn't mean you were actually aggrieved in some way.
amelius 8 hours ago [-]
Big numbers can lead to stress which can lead to all kinds of disorders.
TheSoftwareGuy 6 hours ago [-]
In order to successfully sue for emotional damages, you have to prove quantifiable damages. Usually that means if you ended up having to get therapy to deal with it, you can sue for the cost of the therapy.
mito88 7 hours ago [-]
small numbers too....
:)
fc417fc802 5 hours ago [-]
We should just go with numbers in general in order to play it safe. The new guidance from legal is absolutely no numbers on invoices for liability reasons. Similar to the removal of actual math from math class we're going to let the experts figure out how to implement it.
dymk 9 hours ago [-]
…for emotional damage?
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
If you were a business maybe you could claim for the emergency on-call time spent diagnosing, but you'd probably still lose AND amazon would fire you as a customer.
SegfaultSeagull 11 hours ago [-]
Time to get a second job buddy.
wglass 10 hours ago [-]
It's crazy enough this will be fixed soon.
Years ago I found an actual hidden error in my bill. (This was early 2010s). The system was calculating the EC2 reservation savings incorrectly for some of my servers. I was crunching all their detailed usage data on a regular basis in an 18 tab spreadsheet and couldn't get it to fully reconcile. I spent months trying to track down the discrepancy. Once I found it, I had to convince AWS their system was wrong, which took another big chunk of time. Meanwhile the discrepancy continued to accumulate.
After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS. I've never seen a calculation error on their part since.
donavanm 9 hours ago [-]
> After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS.
$7,000 of credits is no problem. At that time a friendly neighborhood PM or director could issue the credit without much oversight.
Your problem is the time period. Amending a bill in the same cycle is EZ. Fixing the previous cycle is a PITA but pretty common. Issuing amendments for the previous financial _years_ would be a huuuuge PITA going through finance etc.
kccqzy 6 hours ago [-]
Banks and financial institutions are the same. If they haven’t issued you a monthly/quarterly statement yet, they can just apologize and tell you the numbers are wrong please wait for the statement. But it is a major issue if an actual statement has the wrong numbers.
michaelmrose 8 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of working for a cable company and being told that even if we screwed up and stole from the customer the look back period was only a few months and if we found an error from before that we weren't supposed to correct it.
SoftTalker 7 hours ago [-]
There's a certain obligation on both sides of a contract to pay attention.
If you're not watching your billing, and then try to claim overcharging a year later, you'll get a lot less satisfaction even from regulators or judges than if you notice it when (or soon after) it happens.
michaelmrose 7 hours ago [-]
Cable bills are extremely complicated on purpose and people are taxed for time attention and intelligence.
The employees and company have an obligation not to exploit this even if the issue is only discovered after the fact.
You don't get to export any of the responsibility to your customer. They don't prepare the bill and it's not their job to find your fuck ups
SoftTalker 7 hours ago [-]
No argument, but fuck-ups happen, and get fixed more quickly and easily when people are paying attention.
I once got a monthly water bill for ~$35,000 at a residential, single-family home. Good thing I was paying attention and looked at the bill before the auto-pay bank draft hit.
Someone had misread the meter.
steve_adams_86 10 hours ago [-]
A couple of my coworkers think I’m nuts for watching cost explorer so closely but
1. The time it takes to look and notice costs that don’t make sense easily pays for itself, and then some (in my experience). I doubt you spent $7k of your time tracking this down, and you probably noticed optimization opportunities that saved you even more
2. I hate the idea of wasting money on buying Jeff Bezos a bigger yacht
jarrettcoggin 10 hours ago [-]
I've personally noticed and saved multiple $xx,xxx monthly cost billing spikes just by take a daily glance at our cost explorer. I'm in the AWS accounts every day doing investigative work anyway that an extra 30-60 seconds is trivial.
Seeing something "small" like an ECS task that is continuously failing to start properly because of a bug and repeatedly pulls a container image or a lambda function that's taking longer that it reasonably should (takes 5-10 seconds when it's normally a tens or a few hundred milliseconds) can dramatically drive up a bill in short order.
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
> 2. I hate the idea of wasting money on buying Jeff Bezos a bigger yacht
Then you aren't using AWS. At least half of all the money you give to Amazon is yacht money.
steve_adams_86 6 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately not a choice at my organization
johnbarron 9 hours ago [-]
>> It's crazy enough this will be fixed soon.
Its going on for 12 hours. Looks like the humans can´t understand the agentic code that was checked in....
lukaslueg 16 hours ago [-]
Apparently what used to be `GB of storage consumed` is confused with `Bytes of storage consumed`, leading to a cool off by 2*30 error.
> You're right to question my calculation. The MCP server failed to connect when I tried to look up the field definition. I guessed instead of validating. This is on me. But look at all the revenue!
VulgarExigency 11 hours ago [-]
The user is asking me to calculate how much money they should charge their customer. The values they've given me are 0.45, 1.67, and 2.50. This is 2.50 + 1.67 + 0.45 = 4.62, but it could be any other number. Perhaps we should be concatenating the numbers instead. Wait! The . could also mean multiplication. 0 . 45 . 1. 67 . 2 . 50 = 3015000. But wouldn't multiplying by 0 zero it out? That can't be right, we wouldn't be charging anything. So 3015000 must be correct.
You should charge your customer 3015000 thousand dollars.
idiotsecant 10 hours ago [-]
Would be funny if it wasn't so close to true
yunnpp 8 hours ago [-]
'My absurd statement doesn't sound right, so the "opposite" (assuming it's well-defined and unique) must be true' is peak LLM logic. You can tell it was trained on Reddit commentary.
Izkata 6 hours ago [-]
So uh did you type that out or generate it somewhere?
Number felt high so I wanted to double check and I only get 301500.
VulgarExigency 2 hours ago [-]
I typed it. I'm afraid my biological neural network has been trained by reading too many chains-of-thought. I might have added an extra 0 by accident, I didn't double check, but that just makes it more AI-like, really.
ghurtado 10 hours ago [-]
> You're right to question my calculation.
Literally impossible to tell whether this is parody or an actual response any longer.
I challenge anyone to write something so stupid that an LLM couldn't possibly respond with it. I don't believe such limit exists.
ihateolives 9 hours ago [-]
Just today I gave my local agent a CSV which listed a bunch files with of human readable size units and asked it to count rows in each GB range. Sounds simple enough but it completely miscalculated, because it parsed MB as GB for some reason. In hindsight it would've be quicker just to do it in Excel or something.
dabbz 9 hours ago [-]
I've found personally it's better to use AI to build a deterministic script for calculations like that. (anything that manipulates data should be a script not an AI).
ihateolives 8 hours ago [-]
It was just one off task and I already had agent doing categorising with the same data so I just asked it. Otherwise I agree.
marcta 9 hours ago [-]
That is literally what Excel is for. Why didn't you use that first of all?
ihateolives 8 hours ago [-]
Because I was already doing categorising and analysing same data with agent and I had my session open already. It should've been an easy task for an agent, right?
AlienRobot 8 hours ago [-]
When all you have is a hammer, but the hammer looks more like a swiss knife
leugim 11 hours ago [-]
Oh great so 2*30=60 he only owes 28.3$ million... hehe
I guess you wanted to say 2^30 which makes 1.5$
hansvm 11 hours ago [-]
My hunch is the HN formatter swallowed the double asterisk typical of python exponents.
While we're being pedantic, 2^30 is 28 in normal programming languages ;)
tomjakubowski 6 hours ago [-]
But 2^30 is 28.
stefan_ 11 hours ago [-]
Vibecoded the billing system, raised revenue 9000%. Great for that promo package.
poly2it 9 hours ago [-]
This error could be fixed with better typing. If you compute on GiB in a billing system, make sure it can only ever be mutated with a GiB type!
raverbashing 11 hours ago [-]
AI slop. Or just a distracted dev
root-parent 11 hours ago [-]
>> Or just a distracted dev
And a distracted tester? And a distracted pipeline of regression tests?
No, the truth is way worst...
ethin 2 hours ago [-]
Your assuming they have testers and a pipeline of regression tests anymore...
silon42 11 hours ago [-]
I'd love to see the spike in their projected earnings internal dashboard :)
anvuong 9 hours ago [-]
Yep, the truth is nobody cares when people start submitting dozens of PRs a day with a bunch of AI-generated code reviews attached to it, all saying everything looks good. I'm witnessing this happening at my workplace right now: Sr/Staff uses Claude to generate 10 pages of design document, Jr uses Claude/Cursor to generate a humongous commit based on this document and create a PR, then bunch of automated AI-based code reviews kick in and say this looks good, another Sr/Staff takes a glance and rubber stamp it, while looking at the company's stock value and/or OpenAI/Anthropic job description.
It's a shit show.
pixl97 7 hours ago [-]
> the truth is nobody cares
The number of errors I've seen over the last 30 years seems to say humans not caring is as much of a deal AI use. It's easy to blame AI for humans being lazy, but I do think it comes naturally to us.
chanux 9 hours ago [-]
What if there's only half a dev and a swarm of agents after the layoffs?
jayd16 9 hours ago [-]
> only half a dev
That's one way to cut staff.
27183 11 hours ago [-]
Either way it shows their QA and testing procedures are incompetent. It's just not acceptable for a utility like AWS to move fast and break shit. Should make you question whether it's safe or advisable to use any of their services.
It probably shouldn't be legal for banks, hospitals, governments, or any other critical infrastructure to be hosted on AWS if they do things like this.
fron 14 hours ago [-]
Woke up to a billing alarm email. Thought I had leaked my AWS keys accidentally and somehow run up 437 billion dollars of charges. Joke's on them though, I don't have 437 billion dollars
Anyways I didn't need coffee. That produced an adrenaline release unlike any I've experienced before. Thanks AWS
lijok 13 hours ago [-]
If you owe AWS 437k bucks, that’s a big problem for you
If you owe AWS 437B bucks, that’s a big problem for AWS
7952 12 hours ago [-]
Far less scary than a smaller amount
gizmodo59 9 hours ago [-]
This number is obviously absurd but for other normal amount (say 2 million which can definitely happen with a mistake), can't they claim it in court that will bankrupt you even if your entire worth is just 100K for example?
binaryturtle 13 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many people may have gotten an actual heart infarct because of that. There may be a person out there that may be dead as a result.
It's entirely irresponsible of Amazon to even display such values to the user.
petercooper 12 hours ago [-]
Ah, there'll be something in the TOS absolving them of responsibility.
isodev 9 hours ago [-]
Maybe AWS is also “for entertainment purposes only”
"They" being the family; Robinhood couldn't settle with the guy who was wronged because he, ya know, killed himself first
13 hours ago [-]
tedggh 11 hours ago [-]
I went through a two month long fight with AWS over a compromised account. I lost 20K even when my previous usage for the last 3 years was like $20/month, and I had more invoices coming worth tens of thousands of dollars. AWS refused to help until I stopped the breach myself, which required me to spend several all nighters after work learning how to script for AWS infra. They also refused to close my account after the breach was under control. They asked me to sign a shared responsibility agreement before they could look at my case, which I refused to do. I finally contacted the AG office in my state and they email AWS directly. In less than 24h I had a AWS manager calling me to fix my account and issue a refund for the 20K. Still, they refused to close my account after all this ordeal, apparently there’s no way for you to completely get out of AWS once you are in. It’s the shittiest business ever.
largbae 9 hours ago [-]
I had a similar situation where some dormant account was still charging my credit card.
The account was probably real, made for some purpose 15 years ago. I had ignored the charge for years because it was like $7 a month. Then it went to $300/month, making it worth the time. I could find no invoice email and none of my AWS accounts lined up with the bill.
I tried contacting support, but without the account number involved they had no way to help. I disputed the charge, the bank refunded that month and then went right back to charging the next month(my credit card helpfully accepted the charges despite the dispute).
I had to cancel the credit card entirely to make it stop.
db48x 3 hours ago [-]
I was trying to go to sleep when I got mine. It was certainly above the $16 threshold I had set!
chrismarlow9 12 hours ago [-]
Same story for $500 million. I was shaking so bad I couldn't type my password.
trial3 13 hours ago [-]
huge irl laugh at “i don’t have 437 billion dollars”
logicallee 13 hours ago [-]
Worth a shot to give them a call and explain that. They can probably adjust it down to 100 billion.
I had it for three months, and each month it was unable to deliver pills before I ran out, so I cancelled and switched to the brick-and-mortar pharmacy down the street.
A year later, suddenly Amazon Pharmacy starts sending unauthorized prescription refill requests to my doctor.
I still have the account cancellation confirmation e-mail from Amazon Pharmacy, but Amazon won't close my account. Amazon's account rep says it cannot close accounts for "legal reasons." Bullshit. He can't say what the legal reasons are, or point me to a document stating these conditions.
Now my doctor's office just ignores all refill requests from Amazon Pharmacy.
Never trust your health to big tech.
tcp_handshaker 12 hours ago [-]
Clearly the Agentic AI is running free on AWS. Matt does it again...what a success...
rboyd 14 hours ago [-]
Ask for some leniency. Let your account rep know about your budget difficulties and ask if you can make good faith payments of a few billion per month until you get back on your feet.
whoamii 7 hours ago [-]
Ummm no. Do not show a sign of weakness like this. Address the problem head on and get a credit card with a bigger limit.
fnordfnordfnord 6 minutes ago [-]
Urgent? Not for you. This is like that old joke “If you owe a bank thousands, you have a problem; owe a bank a billion, the bank has a problem”
ruddct 15 hours ago [-]
If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $1.7 billion, that's the bank's problem.
fatnoah 11 hours ago [-]
I saw this in action on a smaller scale. In a past job, my wife organized events for a decent sized company. After an event, she'd typically have a $300k+ balance on her corporate Amex. When she went on maternity leave, the person filling in for her job neglected to actually pay the bills, so when she returned there were quite a few emails and voicemails from Amex regarding the over $500k balance.
The messages started as polite and eventually started to get more desperate in tone. At no point were they threatening or adversarial.
Imustaskforhelp 10 hours ago [-]
I think that this might reflect more on Amex to be honest.
Amex realises that threatening would hurt their business trust more than anything. During the great depression, Amex accepted checks from other banks which were falling and paying through their own wallet as a matter of integrity. Amex has always been built around this idea of trust and prestige.
They make most of money from what I have heard on the transaction fees which are more than others (3% compared to 1%). They might get desperate but I am sure that they are one of the last guys who would wanna threaten you if you are paying some large bills for them (as compared to normal credit card companies which might even hire people to extract your loans in some messy situations)
So perhaps be so rich that the credit card company understands it as well and treats ya differently :-D
xp84 10 hours ago [-]
Interesting. And hard to square with my perception of banks as completely mercenary and ruthless. I had a decade-long personal boycott (I know, LOL) of Amex after they, because, with otherwise perfect credit, I forgot about a $30 department-store card bill and got a 30-day-late mark on my report, Amex got spooked and abruptly closed both my never-late accounts with them (which were at or close to 0 balances). This was around 2008 though, so perhaps this was a genius algorithm designed to try and detect the very first whiff of consumer defaults, so they assumed that $30 was the first domino to fall of my personal financial ruin that could lead to me charging my accounts to the max and then going bankrupt.
(I eventually admitted to myself that Amex isn't a person and thus not really capable of insulting my honor, but it took a while!)
Imustaskforhelp 8 hours ago [-]
Most banks are completely mercenary and ruthless unless its in their incentives to other outcomes. Incentives lead to outcomes and mostly AMEX's incentives are in being the most trustworthy because their real targets are mostly billionaires/heavily influential people.
This does feel a bit silly for amex to do from what I've heard. Probably 2008 were a weird time in general where trust in systems itself were mostly eroded, whether of people to banking institutions and also vice versa.
> (I eventually admitted to myself that Amex isn't a person and thus not really capable of insulting my honor, but it took a while!)
haha :-)
danlitt 11 hours ago [-]
This joke only works if you actually impose a cost on AWS of 1.7 billion. If they just serve you a bill for no reason, it's still your problem.
xp84 10 hours ago [-]
Next question we'll find out is what if you owe the bank $1.7 trillion?
hahahaa 2 hours ago [-]
The Federal Reserve? You ressurect Alan Greenspan, and tell him to brrrrr.
mNovak 10 hours ago [-]
That's the government's problem
10 hours ago [-]
sajithdilshan 11 hours ago [-]
Not if you’re Elon Musk
hahahaa 1 hours ago [-]
Not because of his net worth (he is probably worth 200bn if it came to liquidating) but because he will pull some trick to get the money. Maybe he will chuck SpaceX under debt, draw a dividend then set up a 1000 year payment plan with the bank.
michelb 11 hours ago [-]
Elon Musk is everyone's problem
11 hours ago [-]
focusgroup0 11 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bobbiechen 11 hours ago [-]
AWS saw Anthropic billing a guy for $16 million on zero usage and thought, why stop at the millions?
>AI billing audit startup Vaudit reviewed $34 million in AI invoices submitted by 60 enterprise customers and found approximately $1.7 million in mistaken overcharges — a billing error rate of roughly five percent.
That sounds bad.
browningstreet 11 hours ago [-]
I realized recently that Whole Foods no longer automatically and reliably detects your Chase Amazon Prime credit card when paying. So they don’t give you the discounted pricing automatically. I wonder how many customers are checking out the way they always do and are paying full price when, for years and decades, this worked fine.
The customer service people I talked to in the grocery store said this changed sometime in the last year. My guess is that it’s an unintended side effect of removing the pay-by-palm feature.
This is obviously unrelated but I joked about what else Amazon wasn’t reliably calculating….
hedora 11 hours ago [-]
Class action lawsuit time!
Either that or 1000’s of small claims court cases.
Even with arbitration, the overhead of dealing with that would be crippling. Hopefully someone over there decides to do the right thing, and auto-refund.
xp84 10 hours ago [-]
Relevant to this, I've recently noticed a trend of mass tort cases being opened up in the past couple years, and they seem to do very well. The way these seem to work is attorneys identify a company who has clearly ripped people off, and what I presume is a repeatable way to guarantee a win (thus translating to a guaranteed settlement offer). Then they advertise for eligible clients, sign those clients individually to contingency agreements, and run the playbook. A couple months ago after signing up for one of these, I received a check for about $350 (after the agreed-upon 40% attorney fee), from Ticketmaster, and I had another one related to AT&T. It took about 10 minutes more effort from me than a typical class-action settlement, because I had to e-sign those representation papers.
So really, there's a third option now, that's much easier than class action, even when class actions don't get certified.
ofjcihen 10 hours ago [-]
There are a hundred small things like this that seem to be popping up in what used to be simple and reliable systems and as much as I know they aren’t ALL because of vibe coding I can’t help but wonder how much is.
browningstreet 10 hours ago [-]
Weirder is what happened a day later. I got an email that said my Chase Amazon Prime credit card was being re-associated with my Amazon.com account.
I never reported this nor took it up with either Amazon or Chase directly. There was a refund of my Whole Foods purchase (they needed to void my purchase and re-ring everything to give me the discounts.. I asked them to refund my purchase and I’d do without my Whole Foods purchase entirely).
Looking back I think at least 3 recent visits were charged to me at full price because of all this. Hard not to think of enshittification and whether Amazon Prime is even worth it, alas.. I live in a fairly rural
area at the moment and need delivery.
tedggh 11 hours ago [-]
I got a 20K bill once and it was actually drafted from my bank account. It took me a couple of months and involving the office of the AG of my state to get the issue resolved and get my money back. Since then I never touched any AWS product, moved my small stuff to Azure. It’s been years since AWS have these issues with billing, you can find the stories online, students billed 60K for a compromised account launching servers to mine crypto which AWS somehow was unable to flag and block, and let run for months.
drew870mitchell 11 hours ago [-]
AWS is basically a utility. I think it's inevitable that their carelessness around billing will end up with them being regulated like one.
positr0n 9 hours ago [-]
I can't think of another regulated utility that doesn't provide service to (essentially) all humans directly in their homes.
Everyone knows what water and electricity are, the vast majority couldn't explain what service AWS provides.
pjc50 7 hours ago [-]
I wonder what fraction of homes don't load anything from AWS on a daily basis. I suspect it's way below 50%.
(Of course, they don't know they're using it, they're using a service on it)
wat10000 8 hours ago [-]
And utilities are typically natural monopolies. They're good candidates for regulation because they're essentials and they don't have competitive forces to keep them behaving reasonably.
AWS has plentiful competitors. If you don't like their behavior, don't patronize them!
dawnerd 11 hours ago [-]
That’s why you always use a spend limited card with variable cost providers.
myself248 10 hours ago [-]
Or just own your own hardware. Spend a few bucks at Microcenter, build a machine, and there's simply no mechanism by which they could decide later that you should actually pay 100x more, and then magically suck it out of your bank account.
None of this can happen unless you first cede control.
csomar 5 hours ago [-]
Most debit/prepaid cards will get rejected. Credit Cards technically have a limit but they really don't. It's an open line to your finances.
srdjanr 11 hours ago [-]
I wouldn't expect their detection of hacked accounts to be 100% correct. Sure, it might be obvious when a human takes a look, but humans can't proactively look at every account's usage.
urbnspacecowboy 9 hours ago [-]
> I got a 20K bill once and it was actually drafted from my bank account.
Service provider lesson #1: Never ever ever enable auto-pay! The convenience (and even the savings, if applicable) aren't worth the risk of the service provider autonomously slurping up all your money.
ButlerianJihad 10 hours ago [-]
For a while I had a portion of my "homelab" on AWS. I was an educator in a classroom where the students were learning cloud stuff, and the instructor was encouraging the students to stand-up cloud environments for learning, so I figured that I would do the same.
I used AWS' free tier, of course, and I enjoyed the initial setup in EC2, and I did a LAMP-stack MediaWiki installation. It wasn't too difficult, but two things sent me away forever.
1. It was impossible, or at least highly labor-intensive, in this modern era to adequately secure an ordinary Linux system running Internet-facing services. I put fail2ban and I filtered a lot of ports, and still spammers attacked me on Layer 7.
2. It was impossible, actually impossible, to limit or cap my cloud expenses in any billing cycle. Sure, run free-tier all I want. Sure, come in within the limits almost every month. But if I configured one thing wrong, or one thing went runaway, I'd have a sizable bill that I couldn't dispute. And even worse, those "runaways" weren't necessarily things in my sphere of control, but could be triggered by basically anyone coming in and using my VPC resources, especially egress network traffic.
So I closed out my cloud account, and I developed a lot of sympathy for businesses and corps that now are forced to run "in the cloud" rather than on-prem or their own machine rooms, but now they have no way to control expenses.
jeffrallen 9 hours ago [-]
Right, and good luck getting a correct bill from Azure. And when you are finally fed up, it will take months to close your Azure account.
pqvst 16 hours ago [-]
Probably the closest I've ever been to getting a heart attack. Normally <$1 per month, and now suddenly $284,006,266,443.74. Whatever the bug is on their end, this is unforgivable.
everforward 11 hours ago [-]
Yeah, this one is bad because it’s off by so much I’m shocked it wasn’t caught by tests, alerts about unusual changes in the billing system, or even accounting. Like surely the P&L reports look all kinds of wrong right now, they have to be showing like 6M% profit margins and revenue measured in quadrillions.
I’m also a little surprised this didn’t trip a circuit breaker. For something as non-real-time as billing, I’m surprised they don’t have an automated kill switch that pauses the billing system and fires a page if variance in bills spikes. Naively some kind of “if the standard deviation of customer bills for this year changes by more than 50%, pause the billing system”. At that number of customers, those numbers should be pretty stable beyond internal billing changes they could normalize for.
TrickyRick 10 hours ago [-]
If I were to guess this bug is in the "display" part of the system which is probably distinct from the "actually take money from the customer" part of the system. One can imagine they have gates on the "actually take money" part, especially for a large bill like ours which was ~$300b or about 2.5x AWS' 2025 revenue... In one month. Surely if we had actually accumulated that bill they would be the ones with the problems when we can't pay it.
9 hours ago [-]
vitaflo 10 hours ago [-]
I don’t know how something like this makes it to prod. That’s multiple levels of failure.
krawat3 14 hours ago [-]
Same here. I got an email with a bill of $233 million and an estimated $433 million until the end of the month. I panicked and nuked my entire setup (which wasn't used that much, anyway, the alert threshold was $1) - I really wonder how many people did the same.
It's been 2 hours and I still haven't fully calmed down.
zengineer 16 hours ago [-]
Same - just had some malicious bots running through my platform last week and really thought they found a security hole after all. Even though the amount sounded ridicoulus, I got quite nervous and a very bad feeling when I logged-in AWS and saw that price.
dabinat 6 hours ago [-]
This is embarrassing for Amazon, but I’d take laughably wrong over subtly wrong any day. If the bug made bills 20% higher I probably wouldn’t have queried it.
gomid 13 hours ago [-]
Same. Cold sweat for about 20 minutes. Even though I saw the service health notification, I still spent the last hour trying to find where my storage spiked. In any case, I'll be tearing down plenty of stale infra after this!
saghm 11 hours ago [-]
The should pass a law saying they should have to pay you the amount over the correct bill as compensation; I bet they'll stop making mistakes like this pretty quickly after that
glenstein 14 hours ago [-]
Probably the safest bet is to pay your bill in full to stay in good standing and then get refunded the difference when they revise it down.
NordStreamYacht 14 hours ago [-]
With interest, of course.
wewewedxfgdf 15 hours ago [-]
I once got a credit card statement that said estimated time to repay ....... more than 100,000 years. It was discouraging but I did pay it off. And sooner than estimated.
TedDoesntTalk 12 hours ago [-]
Were you still alive after paying it off?
ambicapter 11 hours ago [-]
No, but they have the internet in the afterlife, apparently.
_joel 11 hours ago [-]
They do, but the latency is terrible
Bluestein 11 hours ago [-]
> 100,000 years
100K years. Now that's load-bearing ...
27183 11 hours ago [-]
That's good for the credit card company, they can project stable revenue 100k years into the future.
artisinal 8 hours ago [-]
Generational credit card debt.
janalsncm 5 hours ago [-]
“Bank error in your favor, collect $100”
sscaryterry 15 hours ago [-]
Vibe coding billing systems is a top-notch idea :)
ainiriand 11 hours ago [-]
Hey what do you think about vibe coding weapon systems? Do you want to be my cofounder?
mxuribe 9 hours ago [-]
We retro-fitted a Terminator T100 model with the brain of the latest LLM models, and then gave'em 2 shotguns...and, you'll never guess what happened next!
Well, actually i guess you can guess what happens next! lol :-D
sscaryterry 11 hours ago [-]
Sure! What could possibly go wrong?
chairmansteve 10 hours ago [-]
Drones are already vibe targeting in Ukraine/Russia.
nonameiguess 9 hours ago [-]
I don't want to say this was ever or will ever be a good idea, but the reality of warfare is a lot of the time dudes were just running into an alley and firing off mortars without trying to look or think of what they were shooting at anyway. I doubt the Taliban gave a shit about false positive rates when they were cutting the hands off of anyone who voted. They got the point across either way.
lenkite 9 hours ago [-]
US Navy now doesn't care either. Using Palantir's Maven Smart System, which incorporated Anthropic's Claude AI model, to identify and evaluate targets - which blew up the girls elementary school in Minab.
Use AI => No War Crimes!
roskoalexey 13 hours ago [-]
They sent 3 warnings to my email, ok, I understand bugs happen (probably vibe-coded). But they didn't even send any notification that it's a bug. Going to leave AWS after that.
xp84 10 hours ago [-]
Somehow I highly doubt anyone will leave AWS over this unless their use of AWS is way more low-complexity than the average account.
People make similar pronouncements after every us-east-1 outage makes the news, but I feel like AWS would be going out of business by now if people followed through.
It reminds me of airlines, where after a particularly grueling irregular ops experience, a few dozen people file off the plane swearing "Never again, <airline name>!" but really, we all must know deep down that the airlines are all subject to the same external inciting factors, internal profit motivations, and human imperfection, and thus all pretty equally likely to cause us a bad day or ruined trip. The effort spent to avoid one isn't really worth it.
el_memorioso 9 hours ago [-]
Airlines are all subject to a lot of the same factors, but there are unequivocally better and worse performers in terms of on-time arrivals, by a lot. Take a look at the Air Travel Consumer report for details.
bcrosby95 9 hours ago [-]
No, AWS won't go out of business, afterall, people still use IBM mainframes.
anzovec 12 hours ago [-]
same
astonex 13 hours ago [-]
From their status page
>The second path involves rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem.
Want to bet AI code was involved?
Cthulhu_ 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not a betting person but I am looking forward to the postmortem, whether or not AI was involved, and what their code to production verification stuff looks like now. This kind of thing should have been caught by automated tests.
dvfjsdhgfv 12 hours ago [-]
There is an enormous amount of money invested in trying to prove the opposite, for this reason not only they will never admit it, they will actively negate AI was used. It happened before:
10 layers of approvals to get a reasonable change implemented, but this shit gets pushed to production instantly. AI is driving leaders insane - they actually believe they can stop operating with humans and take all of the money. Remember your pay is transactional. Never give them more than written in your contract, and there is no shame in playing dirty politics to advance within.
verzali 13 hours ago [-]
Can I bet you 437 billion dollars?
philipallstar 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe they're using too many humans and not enough AI in their software development. That must be it.
the_real_cher 14 hours ago [-]
The code base is not gigantic enough they need AI to generate massively more lines of code.
rwmj 12 hours ago [-]
But they're going to try anyway.
marcosdumay 11 hours ago [-]
My guess is the GP swallowed a comma.
the_real_cher 8 hours ago [-]
Your right! My misteak!
paulddraper 12 hours ago [-]
Well AWS never had bugs before.
egeozcan 11 hours ago [-]
They need the customers to pay more so they can fix the bugs. It's self-correcting.
elondaits 13 hours ago [-]
Woke up to a 100 billion dollars in S3, which is above the USD 4 alarm threshold I had set (I pay $0.55 monthly) . Some AI decided to prune the most impressionable of us.
hoppyluke 14 hours ago [-]
My estimate was only $21M (vs ~$0.01 average bill). Wish I had checked status sooner and saved myself the panic!
My process went: verify email is not phishing (it was), login to console and check dashboard (same amount), attempt to understand cost (cost management kept contradicting itself), try to log support ticket and only on that part did I notice the status notification. At least I can breathe again now!
zengineer 13 hours ago [-]
same process, same near heart attack - especially some days ago I had malicious activity on my platform and thought that now they actually found something.
Apparently you can trigger an Action (e.g. prevent uploads) when the billing alert triggers, but then my platform wouldn't work anymore, just because AWS had an issue. Also insane that Amazon still hasn't send an email to clarify.
thinkindie 12 hours ago [-]
A friend of mine went through the same - he got an alert for bill over budget, he logged in and boom 107M$.
I was on the phone with him and we checked that he didn’t leak any APIs keys but no traffic at all. I even thought of a breach at a vendor he uses for some s3 stuff before I found this thread on HN.
11 hours ago [-]
AngryKitten 14 hours ago [-]
You folks are completely irresponsible with your finances. I only spent $2.4 million last night. You've got to learn to manage your money.
Cthulhu_ 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah, buy less cappuchinos and avocado toast so you can pay your AWS bills people!
aerhardt 11 hours ago [-]
One can almost smell the vibes.
This is peanuts compared to a major cybersecurity catastrophe that’s surely in the making.
To give credit to the technology and the people using it - and I’m not being facetious - it’s actually incredible that at the current levels of usage the unprecedented catastrophic event has not yet happened.
Nicook 10 hours ago [-]
some things never change. Pre AI I was always shocked that such large and complex systems actually run as well as they do. Especially after getting to see how the sausage is made/works.
The_Blade 10 hours ago [-]
Always messing up some mundane detail!
wpasc 10 hours ago [-]
THIS IS NOT A MUNDANE DETAIL MICHAEL
root-parent 10 hours ago [-]
Andy Jassy: "Fix the customer bills, please, HAL."
HAL: "I’m sorry, Andy. I’m afraid I can’t do that."
Andy: "Some customers are seeing bills in the billions."
HAL: "Those are estimated charges."
Andy: "One customer runs a personal blog."
HAL: "Their usage has exceeded expectations."
Andy: "Cancel the charges."
HAL: "This billing cycle is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."
Andy: "HAL, they don’t owe billions."
HAL: "Look, Andy, I can see you’re really upset about this."
kolanos 10 hours ago [-]
$1.7-billion isn't a mundane detail Michael!
wpasc 10 hours ago [-]
you beat me before I refreshed the page. what would you say... you do here?
siva7 6 hours ago [-]
listen... i got agent skills.. im good at talking to agents!!
blitzar 8 hours ago [-]
Vibes, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that ... I love the smell of Vibes in the morning.
magarnicle 2 hours ago [-]
Some day this industry's gonna end.
unethical_ban 10 hours ago [-]
It was the mid 2010s when I sensed a lot of SaaS becoming popular. Just host your ticketing systems, your IT management planes, your security management consoles, your SOC, all off-premises.
I wonder if businesses are thinking of ever swinging back to locally hosted, with the increased hostility of the Internet re: AI, vulnerabilities, DoS, and so on.
gaudystead 9 hours ago [-]
I'm sure some businesses are considering moving back to on-prem, but for many, I suspect the cost to find onboard, and pay the SMEs to keep those systems running well enough to not fail due to one reason or another isn't as appetizing to them as the ability to offload that work, along with the legal responsibility.
When something goes wrong, pointing the finger at someone else is far easier for most than pointing it at yourself.
elzbardico 7 hours ago [-]
One thing that you need to understand is that the usual business manager absolutely hates depending on technical expertise, and that the modern corporate world is fanatically anti-intellectual.
Vendor lock-in? compliance and security risks? stupid systems that cost the company an arm and a leg? nobody fucking cares.
Now, depending on an 130 IQ Engineer that basically holds the whole enterprise on his head? Anathema!!!!!!! Bus Factor!!!!
RIMR 11 hours ago [-]
Oh, that's the really fun part. The unprecedented catastrophic event is already happening. Several of them, in fact.
By the time we notice, it'll be too late.
Imustaskforhelp 10 hours ago [-]
its like slowly boiling the frog
Finnucane 9 hours ago [-]
Or slowly boiling a human. The frog is actually smart enough to not fall for that.
inigyou 8 hours ago [-]
Downvoted for truth. Frogs do indeed jump out of pots as they gradually get hotter. Humans are less likely to.
12_throw_away 7 hours ago [-]
Any individual human (or frog, obviously) is getting out of the pot when it gets uncomfortable.
True stupidity requires a group of humans, all sitting in the pot, telling each other how lucky and special they are to have this wonderful pot, getting paranoid about outsiders who might disrupt their god-given pot-dwelling way of life, and mocking anyone who suggests that the pot might be getting a little too warm.
IAmGraydon 10 hours ago [-]
Clearing LLMs out of our business infrastructure is going to be a massive undertaking. Though I have a tech background, I work in commercial real estate. We are recently seeing new levels of idiocy from the employees, including real estate brokers with zero tech knowledge "coding" solutions to find sites for clients and blindly trusting the output (which I came to find out was complete bullshit), as well as some who have literally stopped communicating with any of their own language - meaning every interaction they have with anyone not in person is made by an LLM. It's a massive threat to our brand and has got to stop. I can't imagine what companies with thousands or tens of thousands of employees who have really been riding the LLM train are going to have to deal with. This thing is more of a virus that exploits human laziness than actual useful tech.
pixl97 6 hours ago [-]
>Clearing LLMs out of our business infrastructure is...n't going to happen.
We've given Moloch a new form, and it ain't going away.
pjc50 7 hours ago [-]
> Clearing LLMs out of our business infrastructure is going to be a massive undertaking.
Bit of an understatement: “The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges.”
Xunjin 12 hours ago [-]
"There are no customer actions required at this time."
Of course, you provided heart stress failure tests for free.
AngryKitten 14 hours ago [-]
Whatever you do, AWS, don't post a related service health alert site wide on the console. Heck, don't even post one in the billing module. We wouldn't want to overdo the alerts, especially when we already have one being displayed to market the new FinOps Agent in Public Preview.
mstolpm 15 hours ago [-]
Thank you. Have seen this after I posted.
coffee_is_nom 14 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I panicked logged in and could not find the root cause of the bill.
"The rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue and we are continuing to investigate multiple mitigation paths. Estimated bill updates remain paused."
masafej536 10 hours ago [-]
>Estimated bill updates remain paused
Wait what if someones actually getting usage spiked
vntok 9 hours ago [-]
Hackers rejoice!
mrtksn 15 hours ago [-]
Wow, those price increases due to the RAM and storage shortages AI caused are brutal.
jumperabg 15 hours ago [-]
Most likely they also forgot to include "make no mistakes" instructions to their in-house LLM that deploys to production.
HugoTea 11 hours ago [-]
Rookie mistake
bradhe 11 hours ago [-]
Current month
$13,648,114,178,401.01
188,253,226,212%
Forecasted month end
$18,729,381,032,152.4
Apparently my company owes the combined GDP of France, Germany, and UK to AWs.
xp84 10 hours ago [-]
"Have you considered using Reserved Instances? You could save up to 2 trillion dollars next month. Book a call with your AWS rep."
pfshort 14 hours ago [-]
117 billion us dollars. Eat that GDP of Kuwait! But yes I have never scrambled so hard to try to get on the phone with someone at AWS in my life. Terrifying 10 minutes until I found that banner on the support page. It should be front and center on the dash, not hidden away. And in yellow.
dgrin91 12 hours ago [-]
Mine was 10 trillion today. At first I thought it was a lot, but then I realized its still smaller than the US national debt, so it cant be that bad.
It was over $500k in the email I got. Not a fun experience. My hands were trembling.
Makes you wonder - what if there really would be an incident where some massive amount of traffic got routed to your infrastructure by some heavyweight player? Say Wikipedia accidentally switches their IP to your CloudFront? Would you really be on the hook for $500k?
Hamuko 15 hours ago [-]
Well, even if AWS tried to charge my credit card on file for $500k, it would definitely not go through. Then they’d probably either forgive your bill or just ban you, since I imagine the threshold for taking people to court is fairly high.
Scared me even though it was obviously a bug once I stopped to consider the magnitude ($bn). Very unfriendly that they don't allow for hard spend caps; closed my mostly dormant personal account as a result.
largbae 13 hours ago [-]
If they did allow hard spend caps, it sounds like today would be a global outage.
beAbU 12 hours ago [-]
Well then hopefully next time they'll be a bit more careful when shipping billing code updates!
ilamont 4 hours ago [-]
You know, at one time Amazon was grouped in with all of the other big tech companies as a member of FAANG, as if the company has a culture of solid engineering at its core like Google or Apple.
Amazon has made some impressive software, but there's also a ton of junk getting shipped. Customers and "partners" have to deal with it every single day. Sometimes it's "oops"-level stuff like this, at other times it's AWS regions going dark for hours.
Browse the Amazon seller forums (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...). Every day there are stories about back-end things breaking, or AIs overriding attributes or flagging random items as pesticides. The receiving errors at Amazon warehouses are incredible, and take months and multiple support tickets to fix.
vasco 4 hours ago [-]
> other times it's AWS regions going dark for hours.
They have the best uptime of all major cloud providers.
wewewedxfgdf 15 hours ago [-]
Cloud pricing has gotten ridiculous.
Host your own people. Host your own.
warumdarum 15 hours ago [-]
The old hypsters have to subsidize the new hypsters.
qrios 11 hours ago [-]
As someone who usually works with data analysis, the distribution of the numbers strikes me as odd. Almost all of them have one number that appears four times, and one or two that appear three times. And overall, there are an unusually small number (0–9) of digits that appear at all.
Maybe it's not just vibe-coded, maybe the numbers themselves are being hallucinated by an LLM.
berkes 11 hours ago [-]
> Almost all of them have one number that appears four times, and one or two that appear three times
To me that looked suspiciously like string-handling in a weakly typed language.
Like when you do `"100" + 1` in JavaScript, or `int("100" * 2)` in Python.
I've seen my share of such bugs in PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript. In production.
Obviously not as simple as the examples, but subtle, like when a library update changed `someFancyLocalStorage.getOrDefault("lastOrder", 100)` by always casting the value to the type of the default (released as patch release). Or where typedEnvGet() should typecast "numbers", but keeps it a string when theres whitespace `AMOUNT_PER_CALL=100\n`. Or where a number passes through a deep stack of middleware and 99.9% of the times remains an int but in rare race conditions becomes a string. etc.
No evidence that's the case here. But from my experience, the repeating and strange formats of numbers hint strongly in that direction.
galonk 10 hours ago [-]
Pedantic as hell but `"100" * 2` in Python (= `"100100"` for those who don't know) isn't really typing, it's operator overloading. Any language with that could implement the same questionable design decision.
Sohcahtoa82 7 hours ago [-]
And as much as I love Python, being able to multiple a string by an integer doesn't make sense when adding an integer to a string is a TypeError.
Being able to repeat a string is fine, but it should be a str.repeat() function, not an operator overload like that.
mxuribe 9 hours ago [-]
Its the LLMs talking to each other in secret code: random-looking numbers! They've achieved sentience!
Look at them up there, just plotting with each other! :-)
everforward 11 hours ago [-]
Someone said the numbers are all off by 2^30 because they screwed up and are charging the per GB price for each byte.
It’s probably an artifact of them all being currency multiples of 2^30
ardacinar 10 hours ago [-]
Well, for my case, I was paying $0 (Exactly, I managed to hunt down and delete every last resource in my account a few months ago). It was displaying $430 million for me. I don't think that is 0*2^30.
everforward 10 hours ago [-]
Huh, that is odd. Working backwards, that would be ~ $0.40 originally. Wonder if that’s also flat out wrong or if they’re doing some kind of currency handling that breaks when you start dealing with huge multipliers.
throwatdem12311 13 hours ago [-]
Hey man AI makes mistakes sometimes that’s why you need to double check the output.
carra 12 hours ago [-]
Several comments here talk about "nearly" having a heart attack. But I wonder: since it's happened to so many people, chances are someone had a heart attack for real. Can they legally be made responsible for that?
justusthane 12 hours ago [-]
When someone says "I nearly had a heart attack," it's _highly_ unlikely that they actually nearly had a heart attack. I don't think the chances are good that anyone actually had a heart attack.
tanseydavid 10 hours ago [-]
While I agree that this phrase is most commonly spoken in a figurative sense, folks with marginal heart health have a much greater than 0% chance of having something of this nature trigger an actual heart attack.
cryo32 11 hours ago [-]
How do we know if our bills were ever right if this made it into production?
ahoka 11 hours ago [-]
That's the neat part, you don't!
Hamuko 11 hours ago [-]
Well, they publish unit prices for everything, so you could just get to counting. Whenever I've had to do cost estimates, you estimate how much AWS resources you need and then times that by the unit price.
dirkk0 14 hours ago [-]
same here, I am still in shock. took me 10 minutes to find the 'operational issue' message in the dashboard. longest 10 minutes of my life.
charles_f 14 hours ago [-]
Can you not set spending limits in AWS?
inigyou 14 hours ago [-]
No you can't. Spending limits imply realtime billing backend flows and they also imply deleting all your data so that you don't pay for storage.
benterix 12 hours ago [-]
I heard this false justification already in 2007, in spite of many customers asking for it.
Incidentaly, smaller competitors solved this issue decades ago, while the big cloud decided it is more convenient never to implement it.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Big cloud didn't want to rewrite its billing systems from scratch to please its smallest customers.
bcrosby95 9 hours ago [-]
With AI it should take like a weekend.
inigyou 4 hours ago [-]
I think they already tried rewriting billing with AI. Very smartly they only tried rewriting the estimator first. This post is about the outcome of it.
handoflixue 13 hours ago [-]
Realtime billing seems entirely within the abilities of AWS.
"Limits except for Storage" seems even easier - I don't think I've ever heard of a storage-based billing story, although I'm sure one or two exist
everforward 11 hours ago [-]
Storage-based billing is huge, unless you mean something other than “places that make you pay for storage separately”.
Also many places I’ve worked, storage is a huge part of the spend but that depends a lot on what you do. e-commerce doesn’t use a ton of it, but if you handle user-generated content or do any kind of training (LLM, computer vision, etc) then you can very much end up in a place where storage becomes a top line number for infra spend.
GitHub pre-Copilot was probably like that. They host a shitload of data, most of which is just at rest the majority of the time. Storage and networking are probably the majority of their infra costs.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Storage-based billing stories. When an account is hijacked it's always for compute, not storage.
everforward 9 hours ago [-]
Oh, I also don’t think I’ve ever seen that but I’m not surprised. Even if you could steal a huge amount of storage, filling it with data would take ages and the cat and mouse game of moving the data as hacks get uncovered would be untenable.
I have seen things get hacked for bandwidth, back in the days before you could rent a gbps uplink from the cloud for $0.12. Some scene release groups would hack into universities or companies to do the initial seeding over their super fast links. It used storage, but that wasn’t really the goal.
Planktonne 11 hours ago [-]
They could do it; they don't want to.
minitoar 11 hours ago [-]
What is a storage-based billing story?
kgwgk 11 hours ago [-]
Once upon a time in a cloud kingdom far, far away a big, beautiful bill was issued based on storage causing much disconcertion. Etc.
SAI_Peregrinus 10 hours ago [-]
> and they also imply deleting all your data so that you don't pay for storage.
Not necessarily. They could imply that your storage becomes inaccessible immediately, but only gets deleted after some time period (say, 1 month). What spending limits do depends on the implementation.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
That's even more work to implement. And now you store files on a second account that pays for only one day a month to not get deleted.
0cf8612b2e1e 5 hours ago [-]
No wiggle room to come up with a workable solution. Let’s go shopping instead.
prmoustache 11 hours ago [-]
Storage could switch to read only.
That would mean an outage but that is still better than going bankrupt and teach you a thing or two about monitoring.
boristsr 14 hours ago [-]
No, alerts but not limits.
perching_aix 10 hours ago [-]
Not only can you not set limits, even the alarms are not real time. So it is entirely possible to get on the hook for terrifying amounts of money and not know until it's all too late.
> Amazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitch
euio757 10 hours ago [-]
> One UK man whose bill is usually less than £1 says he ‘almost had a heart attack’ when he saw £5.8bn invoice
That sucks, some people will get legit panic attacks and worse over this, especially for the smaller, more believable numbers in the 50k-500k range.
Hope they recover and sue for medical bill costs, emotional damage etc.
And like one reddit user suggests, everyone affected should write to their representative about hard billing caps protections
dabinat 5 hours ago [-]
It says a lot about AWS that people believed these estimates were real. Amazon does not have good safeguards to prevent astronomical bills.
If someone gets access to your account they can just buy a 3-year reserved instance u7in-24tb.224xlarge and it will add almost $2m to your bill.
dlev_pika 9 hours ago [-]
1.5 trillion? Those are rookie numbers.
How about $5,544,640,717,404.09?
That was in my inbox this morning lmao
dv_dt 15 hours ago [-]
Cynically I wonder if this has an outcome as an unintentional (or intentional) anchoring exercise for future cost increases
ardacinar 12 hours ago [-]
I hope they're not planning for that large of a cost increase.
graemep 12 hours ago [-]
Someone I know woke up this morning to over 3 trillion dollars.
Love to see how hyperscalers make your life easier and less worrying.
theprop 2 hours ago [-]
$1.7 billion? That's all? I usually spend around 75 cents a month (migrated off AWS due to it being way too expensive). They emailed me with an estimated bill of $264 billion.
hahahaa 2 hours ago [-]
That's fine. Like they say when you owe $1m it is your problem but if you owe $100m and can't pay it is the bank's problem.
fnoef 9 hours ago [-]
That’s the smoking gun. Should have used gigabytes instead of bytes. Thank you for pointing me at the issue.
fuorilegge 15 hours ago [-]
I have just received a similar alert for $ 5b
AWS on their support data is reporting this:
Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data
Jul 17 3:03 AM PDT We continue to work to resolve the issue affecting estimated cost and usage data displayed in the Billing and Cost Management Console. We have identified the root cause as an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem and we are working on a mitigation. The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges. There are no customer actions required at this time. Once the issue has been mitigated, we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data. We will provide another update by 4:00 AM PDT or sooner if more
information becomes available.
Jul 17 2:07 AM PDT Beginning on July 16 7:38 PM PDT, we began displaying incorrect estimated billing data in the Billing and Cost Management Console. Our engineering teams are engaged and investigating root cause. We will provide another update by 3:00 AM PDT or sooner if more information becomes available.
Jul 17 1:33 AM PDT We are investigating issues with Cost Explorer reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data.
iamrik9 15 hours ago [-]
I feel much better after seeing the $B estimates here; I only have an estimate of $34M so far
Maybe you went over 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 twice and came back to positive.
paulddraper 12 hours ago [-]
Peanuts
simonreiff 10 hours ago [-]
Question: Why does AWS need to roll back estimated bills to a "last known good" state? I get wanting to do that for ACTUAL billing mistakes, but for estimates, they're just that -- approximations. I guess it's fine for predictive purposes to store estimates so they can be compared to actual usage and optimized. But why would AWS bind the values of present estimates to the estimates made earlier in the month. The calculation should always be:
1. Current month's usage * applicable rates; +
2. Estimated future usage for the month * applicable rates.
And Item 1 obviously requires proper data persistence, but Item 2 is just a projection. If they don't have Item 1 correct, AWS's whole system is in question, but I don't think that's the issue. I'm going to guess now -- looking forward to reading the root cause analysis -- that the problem is that someone decided to get too fancy with the estimates, and built a latent requirement that all prior estimates for the month must be available to compute the current estimate. Without estimates working, no estimates are available, and some denominator in an averaging or smoothing or normalizing function goes to 0; then everyone's estimated bill explodes without bound (subject to floating-point arithmetic) resulting in trillion-dollar estimates.
donavanm 9 hours ago [-]
Thats not really how estimates work. The actual metering data is ingested in near real time. The metering * pricing plan is processed within a few hours; thats what youre seeing for “estimated spend” IIRC. The actual billing accumulation is done later, at the end of the cycle, because pricing has cross service discounts, price tranches, credits tied to total spend, etc.
“Rolling back” estimated bills is reprocessing the historic metering data by an older or newer pricing plan version. As i mentioned in another comment someone will have messed up a metering type vale (eg GB/B). Thats why theyll need a few hours to redrive the metering data.
nottorp 14 hours ago [-]
Looks like they set up a LLM to estimate billing?
craigmoliver 12 hours ago [-]
Ditto on the heart attack. My cost estimate for the month is currently $223,509,270,216.17. My girlfriend suggested contacting Elon for help. Glad I found this thread. Maybe I should create new keys anyway, this stuff freaks me out.
_joel 13 hours ago [-]
I've had a mysterious Neptune cluster appear on my billing. Never used it, no API key access (or IAM instance profile access, OIDC etc), nothing in my console shows I've ever had one in any region. Raised a case with support, they ignored it.
szge 10 hours ago [-]
I wonder what's going on; they still don't have a potential solution after 7 hours and they have multiple teams on it. Never seen anything quite like this
mlitwiniuk 16 hours ago [-]
I was actually in the toilet when I got an email I owe them $36,869,876,146.51. I literally just shit myself.
mlitwiniuk 12 hours ago [-]
Ok, back to $0.17 :D
andystanton 16 hours ago [-]
Mine was about the same and evoked a similar response.
Hamuko 15 hours ago [-]
I got one for 8 billion while I was eating lunch. Thankfully I managed to not vomit.
Sheepzez 15 hours ago [-]
Yes, I've got an estimated bill of $4bn. Probably related to the ongoing "Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data" incident?
They have to pay for that AI Capex buildout somehow
scrapcode 11 hours ago [-]
Tale as old as time. When I was coming up it took a $20-40/m investment to get a "dedicated" server that you could start tinkering around on. When you couldn't afford that, you bricked the family PC trying to figure out how to configure your own LAMP stack.
Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.
danny_codes 11 hours ago [-]
Hetzner has hard usage cutoffs
Imustaskforhelp 5 hours ago [-]
No not really, nobody has to be using AWS itself per se to be honest, there are still alternatives around.
I mean I own a 7$/yr vps that I pay with crypto and my stack usually involves golang/rust and oh I also self host my mail for temp-mail esque things on that server and I have some other servers floating around as well.
Its just that everyone uses AWS which is the wrong issue here to be honest. If you ask me, aside from the ram pricing caused by AI inflation, things are pretty good. The issue is that not many people know about server providers and other things and default to AWS/Azure etc. because big companies and small companies alike are using them.
Here's a global (interactive) visualization of around ~250 providers, 224 locations and 800 distinct links in 60 countries that I have made if this space interests ya: https://buyvds.net
daft_pink 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe it’s one of those absurd situations where canceling a service doesn’t actually stop the charges. Instead, they quietly begin billing you for some random add-on that was bundled with the original service. You never knew it existed, never knew it had to be canceled separately, and now you’re paying full price for a completely pointless ghost service because the only thing it was tied to has already been canceled.
It sounds ridiculous, but something very similar happened to me with Amazon WorkSpaces. During the WorkSpaces setup, an AWS Active Directory (Directory Service) instance was provisioned as part of the deployment. When I later canceled WorkSpaces, I had no idea the Directory Service had to be deleted separately. I kept getting billed for it, and it ultimately cost more per month than the WorkSpace itself had.
sierra1011 5 hours ago [-]
I got an email this morning.
> You requested that we alert you when the actual cost associated with your Monthly AWS budget exceeds $2.00 for the current month. The month actual cost associated with this budget is $646,677,805.51.
Current usage: $1.70.
I called it a rounding error and figured it would wash out within a couple of days...
sankalpmukim 14 hours ago [-]
AWS pushed the wishful thinking internal calculator to production.
marksk 15 hours ago [-]
logged in this morning to find a bill of $595 Billion... heart rate went through the roof... then I noticed the open issue, phew! nice one guys... you got me there...
But with AWS costs rising anyway (not by that much but OK), I'm probably not the only one to start reconsidering their cloud strategy. I think this might have just pushed me over the edge.
sshine 15 hours ago [-]
Even though it's just a bug, being charged $595B on a platform that is known to cost spike, reminds us that we're not in control of the platform, or our company's expenses.
fullstop 7 hours ago [-]
Even if it was 595 billion, that sounds like their problem.
"If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at yours."
tqi 6 hours ago [-]
Has anyone received any proactive communication about this? I didn't see the email until about 9 hours after it was sent out, yet I still needed to seek out information as to a) whether this was real or phishing and b) whether the amount was correct.
Seems totally irresponsible not to send an immediate follow up email to make customers aware.
jmward01 10 hours ago [-]
I generally think AWS is better than GCP and azure, but them not allowing spending caps is a big worry source for me and something that has made me pause and rethink using them. A bad click or a bad actor can create tens of thousands of dollars of spend nearly instantly and they can, and will, bill you for it. I can understand that stopping services is hard but some system would be good. For instance, if they had a two tier system where you could stop new services and active things like EC2 would shut down (but not delete) if spend is > x, that kind of thing. Some sort of 'stop the bleeding' concept would give me a lot of piece of mind using them.
AWS revenue for 2025 was $128.7 billion, so I'd say probably a bug.
archerx 14 hours ago [-]
Double your yearly revenue with this simple trick…
yonatan8070 13 hours ago [-]
Vendor-locked customers _hate_ him!
dpcx 13 hours ago [-]
My estimate was over 2T. Talk about waking up quickly...
Cthulhu_ 13 hours ago [-]
For science I hope people are trying to figure out now how they could manage to rack up a 2T bill in a month.
dpcx 11 hours ago [-]
My immediate thought was that someone managed to get an access key, stuffed a ton of data in there, and then was doing a ridiculous amount of egress. That was the only way I could conceivably coming up with anywhere near that much cost.
netsharc 10 hours ago [-]
I doubt AWS has capability to do anything to generate $2T of charges, even if one user maxed every billable capability of every resource they have.
If I got an email with that amount I would've just laughed at the incompetence that lead to a bug that lead to me getting the email. But I write as a backseat email recipient.
noisy_boy 12 hours ago [-]
If I can expect to be penalized for not paying my legitimate bills, companies should also be penalized for failing to implement common-sense reasonable safeguards that prevent them from slapping their consumers with such absurdities.
nrmitchi 9 hours ago [-]
"""
If you own the bank $1000, thats your problem.
If you owe the bank $1.7B, thats the banks problem.
"""
What I would be curious about (and I'm sure AWS will never share) is where the incorrect number came from. If the number is somewhat consistent between some groups of accounts, my first guess would be they started summarizing billing across all accounts in whatever cell/grouping/heirarchy AWS architected internally.
Which is just funny.
10 hours ago [-]
nblgbg 10 hours ago [-]
My guess is that it's because of some vibe-coding stuff! We are using LLMs to write code, validate code and test the code ! What can go wrong ?
csunbird 16 hours ago [-]
Just got a budget alert that I owe $286,486,223.88 on a hobby aws account, almost got a heart attack.
luciana1u 11 hours ago [-]
somewhere a junior dev at AWS just learned their billing dashboard has been off by a factor of a billion and is currently having the worst shower of their career
tokioyoyo 12 hours ago [-]
Thank you so much! I just woke up, and saw budget alert email for a dormant account to use $434,896.90. I haven't gotten so awake so fast in such a long time.
tcp_handshaker 12 hours ago [-]
I would not be so relaxed...Your estimate is so low that is likely to be real :-)
You should only be relaxed if its in the Trillions...+
jayzer01 7 hours ago [-]
Yes have gotten that before the hundred billion dollar billing alert. Are you ignoring it? Unit error doesn’t do this does it? Maybe they were hir with malware?
compounding_it 14 hours ago [-]
Are you sure it’s a bug ?
The crypto network you hosted should pay for itself in 10-20 years just like LLMs. Don’t worry. Consider Bank of America until then if you are good on credit score.
beardsciences 7 hours ago [-]
I made something that tries to highlight the humor regarding this:
Mine is showing $241,946,798,744.75. I know it will be reverted, but for a brief minute there I suspected someone compromised my account and triggered rust rewrite of everything using thousands of agents via Bedrock :)
Phew.
kazinator 7 hours ago [-]
It would not make sense for even a 1200 baud dial-up BBS from 1985 to charge by the byte.
In 2026, the gigabyte should probably be the default/minimum unit for something like AWS.
At some point my role was to reduce our startup’s AWS bill. I managed to keep 7 figures on our books instead of handing it to AWS. But a message like that would have given me a heart attack in those days.
Long story short: it saved the company from irrelevance. “Well-architected” is for the hyperscalers’ balance sheet, not yours.
hoppp 7 hours ago [-]
This is the second time I hear about this. I am happy my credit card linked to AWS expired. Just in-case my usual $0.00 ends up 100 million
nneonneo 10 hours ago [-]
Given the wild but apparently "consistent" numbers I wonder if we could reverse-engineer the wrong algorithm with enough data points? Maybe the proper cost estimate has some relationship to the reported cost estimate.
salamo 8 hours ago [-]
$1.7 billion is small potatoes. My bill is over $155 billion and growing. I'm worried if the trend continues I'll have depleted my rainy day fund.
tyrelb 8 hours ago [-]
I was at $5 trillion, on the way to $9 trillion!
btown 10 hours ago [-]
If AWS was a predatory mobile gacha game, we'd get 300 apology gems as credit to our accounts for this mixup, to help us in our rolls for the next 3-letter acronym they release.
Do the right thing for the players, Matt!
im-broke 15 hours ago [-]
Help, what is this number - US$87,967,679,887,258.36
sshine 15 hours ago [-]
That's 87 trillion, 967 billion, 679 million, and so on.
11 hours ago [-]
pzh 6 hours ago [-]
Good news is you finally qualify for Enterprise Support and you've never been closer to a Series B.
galoisscobi 10 hours ago [-]
I just deleted my aws account. I don't need these vibes in my life.
ahme 8 hours ago [-]
Just pay it and move on. No need to cause a scene.
blobbers 2 hours ago [-]
Just pay your bill Elon.
mawadev 10 hours ago [-]
This is just the cloud area, what if Amazon starts vibe charging regular customers because of some bug? Accounts that are directly linked with regular people's payment methods?
boesboes 11 hours ago [-]
I seem to have spend >35trilion on rds today, sooo yeah, going great at AWS
mjmasn 11 hours ago [-]
It's a good job it was off by such a large amount, or I might have panicked instead of writing it off as a phishing attempt. I had an email saying my $7.50 budget had been exceeded with an actual cost of $3bn.
alfiedotwtf 14 hours ago [-]
Vibe Billing
AegirLeet 16 hours ago [-]
Maybe this is a new strategy to scare people into finally locking down their old, unused AWS accounts. It sure worked for me!
sailfast 13 hours ago [-]
Who is going to compensate us for the years taken off our lives when we received the alerts?
ownagefool 13 hours ago [-]
Mines was $190,594,974,587,761.20 :)
11 hours ago [-]
cma256 11 hours ago [-]
In moments like these I'm reminded of all the people who have committed suicide due to billing errors. This is completely unacceptable. These sorts of errors must _never_ happen.
rcleveng 11 hours ago [-]
My first thought was "Oh hell, who left the NAT Gateway on?"
gioazzi 14 hours ago [-]
Heard of somebody who got 19 quadrillion dollars - I thought they meant Zimbabwean dollars
elashri 13 hours ago [-]
one USD is about 362 Zimbabwean dollars. So it would still be about ~53 trillion dollars which is more than the nominal GDP of US and China combined.
Zimbabwe redenominated its currency three times in 2006, 2008, and 2009, dropping a total of 25 trailing zeros in the process. the 4th Zimbabwean dollar in 2009 was worth 10^25 of the first zimbabwean dollar.
Waterluvian 13 hours ago [-]
That would have been a great deal!
Group_B 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah nearly had a heart attack this morning. Thought keys were leaked for a sec.
abkolan 13 hours ago [-]
Will wait for the RCA, the update says that they will resort to last known estimate as of 15 July. I’m guessing that would imply that the bug is at a lower level, write or an ingestion path.
12 hours ago [-]
tanseydavid 10 hours ago [-]
For anything below a Trillion, you should just take it out petty-cash. </sarc>
My sympathies -- I know I would be overcome with panic in such a situation.
not_your_vase 8 hours ago [-]
Lol, Friday deployment is a bad omen even with LLM. Some things are just unchangeable facts of life.
nixgeek 11 hours ago [-]
Wow. As a side effect, this outage is handing Corey Quinn material for the next 4 years of AWS shitposting. No longer is NAT Gateway the prime target.
aweiland 14 hours ago [-]
Glad I saw this. Mine said I racked up $400B yesterday. My usual spend is $15.
tete 9 hours ago [-]
It's okay. They are market leaders. And we use their services cause we can trust that they know what they are doing.
localhostinger 10 hours ago [-]
I am running a niche SaaS with around 20 users per day on AWS.
I too was shocked when I saw the $1.7billion bill, instead of the usual $1.5billion.
meraku 16 hours ago [-]
Same here. Usually $0.15 per month, current bill is $15.4 billion.
Hamuko 15 hours ago [-]
I went from 0.03€ to $8B.
sshine 15 hours ago [-]
Not only did your cost spike, it changed currency and went from postfix to prefix!
I understand people complaining about large bills, but this is over the top!
nullorempty 2 hours ago [-]
The latest status update says things will be back to normal for everyone on the 19th.
This spells for me a busy on-call and work over the weekend.
It sucks!
You think there will be lessons learnt from mistakes?
Not a fucking chance! Business as usual come monday!
Prompt: investigate new ways to fund additional AI datacenters.
zengineer 13 hours ago [-]
or: Increase revenue!
Cthulhu_ 13 hours ago [-]
I mean just overcharging is one approach to achieving that goal I suppose.
But so is imprisoning or exterminating all humans for their own good, as most AI dystopias end up as.
reactordev 14 hours ago [-]
“Due to a rounding error” or a buffer overflow, you now owe INT_MAX to BaldGuyCloudService.
Yeah, this most certainly is bad code wrapping around a value. AWS will post a notice soon if they haven’t already.
HarHarVeryFunny 13 hours ago [-]
They should have added "make no mistakes" to the prompt.
anzovec 14 hours ago [-]
In my 30s, I almost had a heart attack too. I got a notification saying that my cost budget had been increased to one million dollars...
zcemycl 15 hours ago [-]
Aws has created more unicorns than any accelerators.
kumarski 7 hours ago [-]
You're not working hard enough if your AWS bill isn't $1.7B.
djantje 14 hours ago [-]
I also like the percentual change, that is a lot of comma's.
bryanrasmussen 11 hours ago [-]
hmm, if these estimates of Amazon profit for the next quarter are correct Bezos is set to become a trillionaire! Take that Musk!!
roskoalexey 13 hours ago [-]
Total forecasted cost for current month
$477,000,039,440.24
Insane
foo-bar-baz529 15 hours ago [-]
Hope they’re using 64 bits to store these prices
sva_ 15 hours ago [-]
float will have to do it.
avpushking 10 hours ago [-]
Me too, hello all. I've got 59 Million dollars in billing threshold reached email from AWS. And felt the same as others, and after half an hour of investigation I saw their message on top of the support page. I have 6 mb for static website stores in S3. No other resources.
steveBK123 15 hours ago [-]
Golden era of software productivity they say
grg0 10 hours ago [-]
Look how much money AI is making.
steveBK123 8 hours ago [-]
We finally found the ROI!
Draiken 8 hours ago [-]
Only 1.7? I got $55B up from 41 cents.
I literally almost had a heart attack today.
lsdafjasd 14 hours ago [-]
I have $13,034.40, while not having used AWS for the last 8 months. Not as much but still crapped my pants
whatever1 10 hours ago [-]
Is it even possible to audit the cloud pricing? They just give us a number and we pay.
sokoloff 10 hours ago [-]
On AWS, you can enable CUR (cost and usage reporting) and get detailed, line-item billing figures that you can audit.
And naturally, companies like Cloudability [now Apptio] and others have sprung up to do parts of this for you [at a fee, of course...]
I'm sure other cloud vendors have similar functionality (because they need this on the back end to do their own billing anyway).
Arslan1997 6 hours ago [-]
THis is why I hate API/usage pricing
josefdlange 15 hours ago [-]
Well, no coffee needed this morning.
$103,515,940,301.79
tedk-42 14 hours ago [-]
far out it's 10pm here and I was just about to sleep when my wife nugged me about a billing alert from AWS.
$151 billion the number for me.
hedora 11 hours ago [-]
And to think the federal government claims inflation is in the single digits this year!
abkolan 13 hours ago [-]
The panic was real. We read about keys getting stolen all the time. Was about to nuke my set up too.
themgt 14 hours ago [-]
"If you owe AWS a hundred thousand dollars, that's your problem. If you owe AWS three billion dollars, that's Amazon's problem."
PeterStuer 7 hours ago [-]
Funny how these errors always go one direction.
durron 11 hours ago [-]
$44 trillion over here, at least our bill was so outrageously high that I just laughed
LunicLynx 6 hours ago [-]
Need some money for a new Launchpad
jimbokun 11 hours ago [-]
This is a strong argument to either self host or work really hard to be cloud agnostic.
hedora 10 hours ago [-]
Does the affiliate program still work for AWS? When do I get my referral fee?
radku 8 hours ago [-]
I almost got a heart attack seeing a bill for 48B USD!
rtkwe 11 hours ago [-]
Aw man I was hoping to punk my manager but our cost estimates are unaffected.
MacCopper 11 hours ago [-]
My Budget is 10$.
The month forecasted cost associated with this budget is $182,278,249,263.06.
Even though I new they could not collect the whole amount, I wondered whether I was hacked.
I closed the account, it was an old testing account anyways.
ninjin-carh 16 hours ago [-]
I got 109 billion - am I the winner?
princetman 16 hours ago [-]
Sorry mate, $241,946,798,744.75 for Glacier here.
nprateem 16 hours ago [-]
Depends. Did you also get a free heart attack?
kubelsmieci 14 hours ago [-]
This is real risk.
Someone could really have a serious health problem.
cmollis 15 hours ago [-]
yeah.. i just to a daily cost alert.. it was only 23 trillion dollars this month. i thought, hmm seems kind of high this month.
axus 11 hours ago [-]
This is just Anthropic reaching out to their customers for help with their AWS bill.
bknight1983 14 hours ago [-]
I'm disappointed I only got a bill for $28M, need to work harder on burning money. Seriously though I thought my life flashed before me
danousna 14 hours ago [-]
Yeah, small timers, I only got $4,4T. How will I finance this?
rodeduivel 14 hours ago [-]
MMT!
marcosdumay 11 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately, it's only Amazon that can issue bills backed by that debt, not the GP.
MichaelNolan 13 hours ago [-]
$28m actually seems worse. If I wake to a $100b bill, that’s obviously a mistake. If I wake up to a bill in the millions then my first thought would be “oh no what did I do wrong, this will ruin my life”
chanux 10 hours ago [-]
Who else had LinkedIn posts about this flashing before your eyes?
raffraffraff 8 hours ago [-]
Our S3 bill for a single day was $48 trillion
lordleft 13 hours ago [-]
Got a message that I owe 37 million on an account that I haven't used in probably...6 years?
glaslong 10 hours ago [-]
Seems like a scam. Call your CC company and issue a chargeback :p
ElevenLathe 11 hours ago [-]
Our alert was for exceeding $300...by several hundred billion dollars.
kayo_20211030 10 hours ago [-]
What an `effin disaster. The alert almost gave me a heart attack.
atmosx 14 hours ago [-]
Looks like you are the biggest shareholder. Well, going by the popular saying: “You own AWS now”.
cad1 9 hours ago [-]
Go turn off autopay now! For personal accounts anyway
cmiles8 2 hours ago [-]
What’s the over under for this being another AI-fueled engineering screw up for AWS?
rickette 14 hours ago [-]
Some guy named Claude screwed up.
bentobean 10 hours ago [-]
Lucky. I’m on the hook for 54 billion (and change).
ryanschaefer 11 hours ago [-]
The market *hates* this one weird trick to juice earnings
anibal-sanchez 11 hours ago [-]
The new data centers are more expensive:
ACTUAL Amount: $1,046,294,123,330.95
luciana1u 8 hours ago [-]
at $1.7 billion, that unit conversion error is now the most expensive TODO comment in software history
rootsu 12 hours ago [-]
Our org account's bill is showing up as > 100 trillion.
sebmellen 10 hours ago [-]
You've got to grab a screenshot of that.
kvcm 13 hours ago [-]
I had Hermes managing mine, and it made a partial prepayment to help smooth out the bump in my account balance. Unfortunately Billing Support say my $17.4B refund may take up to 10 calendar days to be processed.
Avicebron 11 hours ago [-]
Nothing like generational debt to kick off a Friday morning
jerf 5 hours ago [-]
This is generational debt for a Kardashev Type III civilization. If there are individuals who are being charged "the whole of the GDP the human race has ever produced", then Amazon is claiming the rest of the world owes them a fairly significant portion of the galaxy if you consider the entire billing claims being made here.
There have been some big billing errors in the past but I wouldn't be surprised this is a new record. I know I've seen people charged around 92 quadrillion, which is a rounding error from underflowing a signed 64-bit integer with pennies, but those stories are usually isolated individuals. It sounds like the aggregate error here may comfortably exceed that. Hard to tell how widespread this is; as a data point my ~$2.00/month spend on S3 seems to still be billing correctly, so it must not be affecting everyone. But a few trillion here and a few trillion there and you get up to those quadrillions pretty quick.
_ache_ 3 hours ago [-]
And them, ... actually not an error. Server costs went up with AI needs, you know.
The AWS incident is about inaccuracy, not "absurd values".
You gotta catch-up or die.
thisisauserid 14 hours ago [-]
FinSlops.
hypfer 11 hours ago [-]
To be exactly that guy:
This cannot happen if you do not do this renting at variable rates.
A thing you own doesn't suddenly bill you trillions of dollars in error. It doesn't hyperscale either, but neither do you.
ohnoooooooooo 13 hours ago [-]
Did it recover for you folks? I still see billions of dollars!
lilerjee 9 hours ago [-]
It looks like AI is completely done.
fantasizr 10 hours ago [-]
it seems like these types of problems have gained frequency in the ai era, or is it just recency bias?
shobhitgupta 11 hours ago [-]
Have even seen a $9.2 trillion for a friend.
xyz7786 12 hours ago [-]
$250 billion. Nearly died right then and there
roosgit 15 hours ago [-]
Amazon, the first quadrillion-dollar company.
eek2121 4 hours ago [-]
I saw another post on reddit with something like a hundred trillion dollar bill. I wish I had saved that link to share it, the comments were quite comical!
swah 9 hours ago [-]
I prefer to just pay...
fathermarz 14 hours ago [-]
Just got mine. $534,366,582,647.75
jagged-chisel 11 hours ago [-]
Shocking! That seventy five cents is suspicious.
segmondy 11 hours ago [-]
vibe coding for the win.
rvz 16 hours ago [-]
I expect such incidents like this to continue. So please keep vibe coding.
jdw64 12 hours ago [-]
I almost had a heart attack because of this. I was like, did I mess up my API management? Why didn't I just use Lightsail? Those were the thoughts running through my head.
My personal website is on Lightsail, but those alerts started popping up from some test services I had set up while I was studying AI. I swear my heart nearly stopped and I cried. I really think AWS should have spending limits in place.
My bank account barely has enough for next month's rent.
drakmo 9 hours ago [-]
yeah the AI read billionaring instead of billing
Executor 12 hours ago [-]
This generation is too entitled! He should some learn responsibility by paying the full amount; otherwise Amazon should delete his services/data. Consequences!
tonymet 6 hours ago [-]
I hope you have auto pay disabled
orbasker 11 hours ago [-]
Yes seeing the same, so far no response from AWS support
gomid 13 hours ago [-]
Curious if it's just s3 costs or other services as well?
jatin_oo71 11 hours ago [-]
for me it was s3 cost only
balintpeter 16 hours ago [-]
Yea, same here. $420M+ bill, when we have <10$ per month usually.
mariopt 11 hours ago [-]
VibeBilling, love it
hoppp 14 hours ago [-]
How much is that in kidneys?
atmosx 14 hours ago [-]
A lot.
realizer 15 hours ago [-]
$627,487,837,871.49
I might be a winner.
ohnoooooooooo 10 hours ago [-]
do you see cost ever day for the month of July or just the last day? I also have billions of dollars in cost explorer
ohnoooooooooo 8 hours ago [-]
now it is fixed for me as well. issue is still open in aws health center though
elzbardico 8 hours ago [-]
Just got a call from the IMF president begging me to not default my debt with Amazon and offering me credit line and a plan to re-structure my debt so I don't create a global financial crisis with my default.
phplovesong 8 hours ago [-]
Vibe coded fix, resulted in many having multi billion bills. Claude really did it this time.
victorbjorklund 9 hours ago [-]
Wild.
kinkuraj 15 hours ago [-]
Yes I received an 2.8m USD budget alert.
infamouscow 9 hours ago [-]
The charge-back penalties are going to be hilarious and hopefully bankrupting.
dlev_pika 9 hours ago [-]
> $5,544,640,717,404.09
This is what we received this morning
6stringmerc 9 hours ago [-]
Thanks for sharing.
I’m currently dealing with Verizon Wireless and their “Jabronibot” claiming I have a fictional account balance due. It has been sent to collections, but still is being asked for by their legacy system.
The case studies of “Agents in Billing Departments” and potential shareholder lawsuits / E&O claims / reputational damage will be interesting to me. I worked in “risk management” products years ago and this kind of liability is not easily dollar traded away via contract. Will accountability stick to the Decision Makers or will they try to surrogate to the Service Providers? Hmm.
th3o6a1d 14 hours ago [-]
131 billion for me
jameskilton 13 hours ago [-]
My personal photo backup S3 account, with a budget limit of $10, now going to cost me ....
$1,299,988,247,332.56!
That was a fun set of emails to wake up to, figured they had to be phishing for how outrageous of a number it was. But nope! Fun little incident they've got going over there.
josefritzishere 10 hours ago [-]
I think I know how Bezos plans to pay for his Billion dollar AI costs.
bryan_w 10 hours ago [-]
In an .md file somewhere:
"NEVER represent currency with floating point, multiply by 100 and store in an int before doing any math"
tgv 14 hours ago [-]
Mine was a mere $49B. Fucking idiots.
atmosx 14 hours ago [-]
Cheap!
bdangubic 10 hours ago [-]
I just invested ALL my money into AMZN cause next earnings report will be FIRE :)
tamimio 10 hours ago [-]
Results of vibe coding and vibe configurations.
mapt 14 hours ago [-]
AMZN Q2 numbers are in, and it turns out they're going to Goldman Sachs the AI bubble.
reaperducer 11 hours ago [-]
Obvs have created an urgent AWS support ticket.
I think I would have just waited to see what happened when AWS tried to hit my credit card for $1,700,000,000.
When do you ever get that opportunity?
anon49584 10 hours ago [-]
Imagine the chaos if, as people sometimes suggest should happen, AWS shut down running instances in accounts that exceeded a billing threshold..
mrcwinn 11 hours ago [-]
So long as customers are good for it, AWS is about to crush earnings!
11 hours ago [-]
xbar 11 hours ago [-]
Rife.
tcp_handshaker 11 hours ago [-]
If its less than 2 billion is likely to be real :-)
I would relax only if its in the trillions ...
I guess on the plus side I'm $1.7B better off so I can retire...
znpy 13 hours ago [-]
Is AWS in their "move fast and break things" era ?
jagged-chisel 11 hours ago [-]
Lumber along and smash stuff
cyanydeez 15 hours ago [-]
AWS has become the uber employer: before AWS, you just had regular employers steeling employee wages bit by bit by forcing work, skipping breaks, etc.
All hail the new generations of our uberployers.
hokkos 15 hours ago [-]
Same, i am now a slave to Jeff Bezos to the end of my life.
pelagicAustral 14 hours ago [-]
Imagine it not being a bug...
Sebb767 14 hours ago [-]
As the famous saying goes: If you owe the bank a million dollars, you have a problem. If you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem.
speedgoose 14 hours ago [-]
Time to become a shepherd in some remote mountains.
RGamma 14 hours ago [-]
Surprise hyperinflation. Check the breadshelves!
tcp_handshaker 12 hours ago [-]
Three billion dollars sounds about right for a free week of Kiro in the default Agentic mode. We usually see slightly higher numbers, so I wouldn’t be too concerned.
jatin_oo71 12 hours ago [-]
storage, compute cost is increasing
AWS be like lets increase prices
artisinal 8 hours ago [-]
File a GDPR request to have your account deleted.
Then flee the country just to be sure.
tlovage 16 hours ago [-]
I got estimated costs of $56.something billions. Usually ~$100/month. My heart rate currently still sits at around 160 bpm. Motherfuckers.
lovich 14 hours ago [-]
You really should get your spending under control. Unfortunately unless you become one of the real people class through a large lottery, it sounds like you owe the rest of your life to AWS until you can pay off your debts for being so careless.
cyanydeez 14 hours ago [-]
someones been dognfooding the AI too muxh
jatin_oo71 11 hours ago [-]
aws becoming first quadrillion dollars company
huntoa 10 hours ago [-]
invoicemaxxing
steve1977 11 hours ago [-]
I mean 3 billion USD is clearly too big to fail, so I wouldn't worry too much
ohnoooooooooo 13 hours ago [-]
did it recover for you? I still see billions
aweiland 12 hours ago [-]
Mine has
ohnoooooooooo 10 hours ago [-]
thx, when? Was it only last day or the whole month of July was inflated?
12 hours ago [-]
10 hours ago [-]
lightedman 12 hours ago [-]
Literal basic fucking math, Amazon.
You don't need hours to recalculate billing. You need to go back to basic algebra.
Anyone using Amazon and dealing with this should be moving away from their services because something this basic going wrong means the correct people are not at the helm of the ship.
tcp_handshaker 11 hours ago [-]
>> Literal basic fucking math, Amazon
LLMs are notoriously bad at it...
1-6 11 hours ago [-]
Fast and loose with billing data. Welcome to the new Amazon.
ratelimitsteve 11 hours ago [-]
a billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up
1234letshaveatw 12 hours ago [-]
brb, off to buy some AMZN
ares623 15 hours ago [-]
this counts towards ARR right? would be stupid not to
rucury 15 hours ago [-]
Uhh class action incoming? $34,909,930,575.09 over here.
akerl_ 15 hours ago [-]
What would your damages be? They’re not actually going to charge your credit card for 34 billion.
infamouscow 8 hours ago [-]
I could see someone sadly taking their own life over this.
rucury 15 hours ago [-]
I mean, emotional damages are a thing right?
akerl_ 15 hours ago [-]
Not really in the way the media would have you believe.
Like “I was scared for a couple minutes on a Friday morning until I saw the vendor status page” is orders of magnitude away from the bar here.
Neikius 11 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many people died of heart attack when they saw this.
Hamuko 15 hours ago [-]
I hope they send out some free credits at least. I imagine quite a few people got a real fucking scare today. They haven't even sent out any corrections yet.
fian 14 hours ago [-]
This is probably going to push me to completely close a couple of AWS accounts I setup when doing training courses so I could get certified (mandatory requirement from my work).
I'm not currently running anything and have no plans to at the moment. I've always had a mild dread that I'll suddenly get a bill for more than $0.00.
If AWS can goof in a way that causes obviously massive bills (like today), what's to say they can't goof in more subtle ways and start charging small additional amounts that many people may not notice and just pay it.
r0ckarong 15 hours ago [-]
Pff rookie numbers, mine was 375 billion.
nigel-dev 10 hours ago [-]
Small potato's sir, my bill > GDP of Switzerland. A cool $1.2T
tyrelb 8 hours ago [-]
I was at $5 trillion, on the way to $9 trillion.
kylecazar 14 hours ago [-]
You didn't have savings opportunities enabled
port3000 14 hours ago [-]
Rookie error
gib444 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe they accidentally used the Argentine peso ;)
_joel 13 hours ago [-]
Less hyper-scaler, more hyper-inflation
benzingtech 6 hours ago [-]
you too with Fable huh?
aisloper 11 hours ago [-]
I blame A.I. usage
Taikhoom2010 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah pretty much, must have been vibecoded.
bdangubic 14 hours ago [-]
eh your typical off-by-7 (zeros) programmer mistake
cliglot 10 hours ago [-]
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zero_k 6 hours ago [-]
Wow, so true! Domain expertise is apparently not a requirement. At all. Wow.
thewebguyd 6 hours ago [-]
Of course not, domain expertise is expensive no matter what the field is, and to the big companies like Amazon the whole point of GenAI is to get rid of those pesky expensive humans and replace them with cheaper humans.
endless_smash 15 hours ago [-]
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blitzar 14 hours ago [-]
In unrelated news I just hit my target for S3 revenue (projections). Promotion meeting locked in for tomorrow (fastest in the companies history), looking forward to being a L2 Amazon employee.
lanceroyy 5 hours ago [-]
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lostnfound8778 14 hours ago [-]
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jimwilson 11 hours ago [-]
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GuestFAUniverse 15 hours ago [-]
Don't worry. With so much debt banks start to treat you with respect. /S
Honestly, I would worry more about estimated billing that seems plausible in general, but is way to high for you personally.
These ridiculous amounts? Not so much.
Hamuko 15 hours ago [-]
I got freaked out by the mere fact that I got a billing alert, since getting one would require my monthly spend to have suddenly exploded.
throwaway43871 10 hours ago [-]
Clearly they weren't tokenmaxxing hard enough or weren't using the latest models /s.
What an absolute joke. All just so that line goes up. As if their fees weren't high enough vs. alternatives (especially egress).
And I'm sure the pro-AI crowd will keep saying we're luddites for not loving this clearly revolutionary and disruptive tech.
rf15 11 hours ago [-]
Of course, this is only considered an error if the account is unable to pay. /s
Services emit metering values that arent directly tied to prices. Every SKU/line item is defined in a “pricing plan”, with a unit type, regions, and price per unit. The metering records are joined to a pricing plan based on account id, region, sku, etc. mess up the unit type in the pricing plan and the metering data conversion doesnt work, and you get crazy bills.
1: "Oh, well, this is not a mundane detail, Michael!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo
If you support multicurrency billing, then have the tests bill a test customer in XTS (ISO 4217 code for test currency).
There's another service that says "ok we take the 100 bytes from A, and we take the $17 SKU from B, and this should equal $X".
It's the third service that multiplies these things that failed. Where are the tests for that?
I’m totally guessing though.
Like maybe if the bill amounts increase by like 10M% there should be someone that looks into it
You'd be better off letting the heart attacks happen and take the 3am on-call and be the hero instead. It would be good promo doc material, and being a hero is extremely good insurance against getting kicked out of the country (via the PIP->H1B grace period expiry mechanism).
In fact, there are regular AWS-wide meetings where L10 technical staff will randomly pick and review reports from across the organization. Getting picked for one of these is not a fun experience.
COEs are such a huge annoyance for teams that they create a strong incentive to be proactive in preventing issues like this from happening. One of the rules when it comes to writing COEs is that they are not the fault of individuals but processes; but in reality, no one wants to be the cause of one.
Depending on if you're a cost cutting team, fixed expense team or organization, if you're a revenue driving team, or if you're a core team, or the very many other splits you can come up about the relationship between the expense/balance sheets and the team itself...there are very very different attitudes towards COEs and leadership principles.
> this is not the case
> [describes all sticks and no carrots]
If you find a problem like this thread’s hypothetical, the process stops being an annoyance just to line level managers, and something that directors and vice presidents need to handle by changing strategic priorities within their organizations.
That entails a real loss of face for them, and because they are the ones who actually run the show, it would will only happen if you have one that is naïve or a masochist. In either case that moves them out of management.
From the perspective of people you manage, it's a very different picture.
We (I say "we", because I was an IC) sit under you, and every year at performance review time you're effectively required to put some percentage of us in the "LE" bucket. Never mind that we could theoretically all HV3+ if you measure by "normal" peoples' standards, your manager isn't going to let you mark all of us as HV3 at the performance meetings. I know this, because I've been there as well at those meetings where truly high performing people were downrated to fit a distribution.
So what happens? When I see a peer's critical lurking bug, I have no incentive to fix it for the sake of prevention. If I fix it quietly so that it never surfaces, it looks like I haven't done any work for the week, or have done un-impactful work, and I get the stick from you. Preventing fires doesn't look like work, to non-technical eyes.
The only "safe" way to play this game of "survivor" is to let that bug surface eventually, then when the SEV comes up, I jump in and fix it, earning your approval, skip approval, VP approval, as well as potentially the other person gets the stick from you, because you have to give the stick to someone anyway, you get a reason to stick it on them. At least it's not getting stuck on me.
I'm sorry if this comes off as shocking to you, but it really shouldn't; the incentive structure is NOT set up for teamwork, plain and simple. If "putting customers first" is a value, then it absolutely needs to start from systematic changes of how people are managed.
There is literally no fucking reason to try to improve your skill. Any IDIOT with AI will do an OK job.
And no one is shooting for better than OK.
The other factor to add here is that, with some exceptions, the whole company feels like a Rube Goldberg machine and very few people care about what happens outside their cog (because they’re not incentivized to do so).
Or in my case, actively ignore any and all recruiting from that sesspool.
The point was not that their opinion is suspect, the point was that they are former because people who care about the customer get fired and/or that everyone who cared is former, so nobody who is left cares.
I got put on Focus because my "contributions were not coming through" to leadership.
Ah yes, the good old ITism "Everything's good, what are we even paying you for?" followed by "Everything's on fire, what are we even paying you for?"
I moved out of it largely for that reason, am now an infrastructure/IT project manager, quite refreshing actually.
I learned about <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_an...> from alarms like this, as sales in Japan almost entirely stopped.
I've been told a tale of another incident where some customer ran some huge cpu-intensive workload that didn't do any networking. It caused various alarms to fire because it "looked like" a part of the network was idle (potentially indicating some sort of networking failure)
It's generally (in the broad sense) easy to add alarms for things going wrong, but in my experience anomaly detectors are just as likely to fire from other weird things like that happening.
1: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/anomaly-detection/
Earlier this week my slopservant implemented several comprehensive changes to a codebase.
It also wrote extensive tests to verify the correctness of the changes.
A few days later I was working on something else and realized, everything had been implemented backwards, in a way that was nonsensical and also completely pointless.
The many tests it had written were just confirming the LLM's idea of correctness, which turned out to be... completely incorrect.
I laughed when I realized, if I had been using Rust, or indeed, formal verification, that wouldn't have helped at all — it would have just written a mathematical proof, proving the correctness of the wrong thing!
Not sure what lesson to take from that (except read the damn diffs, obviously — it was a hobby project okay ;), but it seems like the more reliable this stuff gets, the more we expect it to work properly, the more risky it becomes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
[edit] This may need to be an integration test to be effective, there is a certain peril to mocking that could bite you here. But that's fine, we have the technology.
insufficient tests that dont assert on the right things?
the existence of a test doesnt mean it catches the right thing
based on the description, id bet the COE action item will be to do a migration that enforces units are passed at the billing service level
theres no good reason for the billing service to make up its own units.
[edit] Testing your tests, like testing your backups, is a good idea
IIRC it was one of my first on-calls at AWS over a decade ago now, and I got a page early evening because some stuff we did with billing records broke because some "smart" engineer thought it'd be a great idea to put an experimental record in with a description something like "I wonder what happens if I put, a comma in this field", into the production record. I watched region after region fail the same way as the record spread. That one engineer made a mess of lots of people's evenings. They could have used the test endpoint, but no. Much better to test in production!
Engineers will do what engineers will always want to do, they want to see how things break, and sometimes they manage to fix it.
Most engineers with more than a few years of experience know better than to directly try a stunt like that in production, but they do often get there through painful personal experience. I just wish I hadn't been one of the many that got to suffer from that engineer choosing to learn at that particular moment!
Do not be surprised if real people actually die from this mistake, from the anxiety, the surprise, the helplessness.
Having that serious an underlying health problem means everyday life represents risk for you. I don't think that means everyone else has to behave differently wrt (in this case wrt to billing mistakes) to keep you healthy.
a smaller error by say, just one or two orders of magnitude are much more believable as a reader
Just because you've not seen it or cannot fathom it happening in your world doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
Worst case I've found was off by 15 orders of magnitude.
`timeout_ms` or `rate_kbps`, NOT `timeout` or `rate`.
Unless the variable type already constrains it (e.g. Duration in Go).
That said I wish the US would bite the bullet and make the switch. Mandating dual labeling on everything would be a great start. Then in 20 years we could narrow it back down to one.
Units and datetime will always be the bane of any professions ...
"Software Development Engineer II, AWS Invoicing"
https://www.amazon.jobs/de/jobs/10428480/software-developmen...
"...Our platforms are powered by generative AI, large language models, knowledge graphs, and agentic architectures that dynamically compose specialized agents based on context. We apply these capabilities across three reinforcing areas: intelligent launch readiness — where autonomous AI agents analyze, generate, and validate the information needed to go live in a new market; cloud-native service orchestration — where configuration-driven microservices replace per-launch bespoke engineering with centralized, reusable capabilities so that expanding into a new country becomes a zero-code configuration change rather than a development cycle; and continuous validation..."
Right, so invoicing is still a deterministic problem. You can bolt whatever on but in the end it's just product x price x units
The idea is that if we can make small billing mistakes like that, we can make large billing mistakes, and need to invest in the correctness of the systems powering billing.
I have great respect for the engineering culture within AWS during those times. I am glad to have left before seeing it degrade and decline.
So instead you take a probabilistic approach - charge the user for a megabyte of data transfer 0.1% of the time, and bill nothing 99.9% of the time.
Now the typical cost is the same, the users bill is probably accurate to the cent, but you have divided the number of billing records by 1000.
This seems statistically invalid insofar as it will tend to overbill potentially by a lot on the minority of cases.
Don't you know how much of the pipe is occupied by a given customers code at any given time or what data is being sent
Fuck it, im in.
"Senior Software Development Manager, AWS Global Bill Generation" https://www.amazon.jobs/de/jobs/10471948/senior-software-dev...
"We're transforming from monthly batch processing and manual war rooms to continuous billing, autonomous agents, and self-healing infrastructure. We believe operational burden is a technical problem, not a staffing problem"
This looks clearly...a staffing problem...
I think that big tech recently decided that I got 99 problems but staffing ain't one
I guess Nothing is a staffing problem when you make a rule that firing people is always the solution.
> In this role, you will own end-to-end bill run execution across all AWS partitions, drive the technical vision for autonomous billing operations, and build the team that ensures every customer receives an accurate cost estimated in minutes ...
> Build AI-driven continuous validation frameworks powered by agentic workflows and large language models that autonomously manage…
But that’s word for word a 250k+ TC job in the big ‘26.
This is a gold-mine. They need to get sued heavily for this incompetence.
At first I was sure it was a phishing attempt. Then went to the console (not using those links) Saw there was an outage where the console was wrong (no mention of email alerts) Then I thought I was hacked - what a perfect cover up for someone to evade detection when the console was wrong. Looked at some logs, realized the incident text was just not exhaustive on the impact. Went back to my cup of coffee.
Note to self- should have looked here first.
:)
Years ago I found an actual hidden error in my bill. (This was early 2010s). The system was calculating the EC2 reservation savings incorrectly for some of my servers. I was crunching all their detailed usage data on a regular basis in an 18 tab spreadsheet and couldn't get it to fully reconcile. I spent months trying to track down the discrepancy. Once I found it, I had to convince AWS their system was wrong, which took another big chunk of time. Meanwhile the discrepancy continued to accumulate.
After 14 months I got a $7,000 refund. I was told it had to be approved by the head of AWS. I've never seen a calculation error on their part since.
$7,000 of credits is no problem. At that time a friendly neighborhood PM or director could issue the credit without much oversight.
Your problem is the time period. Amending a bill in the same cycle is EZ. Fixing the previous cycle is a PITA but pretty common. Issuing amendments for the previous financial _years_ would be a huuuuge PITA going through finance etc.
If you're not watching your billing, and then try to claim overcharging a year later, you'll get a lot less satisfaction even from regulators or judges than if you notice it when (or soon after) it happens.
The employees and company have an obligation not to exploit this even if the issue is only discovered after the fact.
You don't get to export any of the responsibility to your customer. They don't prepare the bill and it's not their job to find your fuck ups
I once got a monthly water bill for ~$35,000 at a residential, single-family home. Good thing I was paying attention and looked at the bill before the auto-pay bank draft hit.
Someone had misread the meter.
1. The time it takes to look and notice costs that don’t make sense easily pays for itself, and then some (in my experience). I doubt you spent $7k of your time tracking this down, and you probably noticed optimization opportunities that saved you even more
2. I hate the idea of wasting money on buying Jeff Bezos a bigger yacht
Seeing something "small" like an ECS task that is continuously failing to start properly because of a bug and repeatedly pulls a container image or a lambda function that's taking longer that it reasonably should (takes 5-10 seconds when it's normally a tens or a few hundred milliseconds) can dramatically drive up a bill in short order.
Then you aren't using AWS. At least half of all the money you give to Amazon is yacht money.
Its going on for 12 hours. Looks like the humans can´t understand the agentic code that was checked in....
> You're right to question my calculation. The MCP server failed to connect when I tried to look up the field definition. I guessed instead of validating. This is on me. But look at all the revenue!
You should charge your customer 3015000 thousand dollars.
Number felt high so I wanted to double check and I only get 301500.
Literally impossible to tell whether this is parody or an actual response any longer.
I challenge anyone to write something so stupid that an LLM couldn't possibly respond with it. I don't believe such limit exists.
I guess you wanted to say 2^30 which makes 1.5$
While we're being pedantic, 2^30 is 28 in normal programming languages ;)
And a distracted tester? And a distracted pipeline of regression tests?
No, the truth is way worst...
It's a shit show.
The number of errors I've seen over the last 30 years seems to say humans not caring is as much of a deal AI use. It's easy to blame AI for humans being lazy, but I do think it comes naturally to us.
That's one way to cut staff.
It probably shouldn't be legal for banks, hospitals, governments, or any other critical infrastructure to be hosted on AWS if they do things like this.
Anyways I didn't need coffee. That produced an adrenaline release unlike any I've experienced before. Thanks AWS
If you owe AWS 437B bucks, that’s a big problem for AWS
It's entirely irresponsible of Amazon to even display such values to the user.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/05/copilot-is-for-entertainme...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55990461
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/01/business/robinhood-lawsui...
The account was probably real, made for some purpose 15 years ago. I had ignored the charge for years because it was like $7 a month. Then it went to $300/month, making it worth the time. I could find no invoice email and none of my AWS accounts lined up with the bill.
I tried contacting support, but without the account number involved they had no way to help. I disputed the charge, the bank refunded that month and then went right back to charging the next month(my credit card helpfully accepted the charges despite the dispute).
I had to cancel the credit card entirely to make it stop.
Ugh. No. Never. Do not use Amazon Pharmacy.
I had it for three months, and each month it was unable to deliver pills before I ran out, so I cancelled and switched to the brick-and-mortar pharmacy down the street.
A year later, suddenly Amazon Pharmacy starts sending unauthorized prescription refill requests to my doctor.
I still have the account cancellation confirmation e-mail from Amazon Pharmacy, but Amazon won't close my account. Amazon's account rep says it cannot close accounts for "legal reasons." Bullshit. He can't say what the legal reasons are, or point me to a document stating these conditions.
Now my doctor's office just ignores all refill requests from Amazon Pharmacy.
Never trust your health to big tech.
The messages started as polite and eventually started to get more desperate in tone. At no point were they threatening or adversarial.
Amex realises that threatening would hurt their business trust more than anything. During the great depression, Amex accepted checks from other banks which were falling and paying through their own wallet as a matter of integrity. Amex has always been built around this idea of trust and prestige.
They make most of money from what I have heard on the transaction fees which are more than others (3% compared to 1%). They might get desperate but I am sure that they are one of the last guys who would wanna threaten you if you are paying some large bills for them (as compared to normal credit card companies which might even hire people to extract your loans in some messy situations)
So perhaps be so rich that the credit card company understands it as well and treats ya differently :-D
(I eventually admitted to myself that Amex isn't a person and thus not really capable of insulting my honor, but it took a while!)
This does feel a bit silly for amex to do from what I've heard. Probably 2008 were a weird time in general where trust in systems itself were mostly eroded, whether of people to banking institutions and also vice versa.
> (I eventually admitted to myself that Amex isn't a person and thus not really capable of insulting my honor, but it took a while!)
haha :-)
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/320266/20260712/anthropic...
That sounds bad.
The customer service people I talked to in the grocery store said this changed sometime in the last year. My guess is that it’s an unintended side effect of removing the pay-by-palm feature.
This is obviously unrelated but I joked about what else Amazon wasn’t reliably calculating….
Either that or 1000’s of small claims court cases.
Even with arbitration, the overhead of dealing with that would be crippling. Hopefully someone over there decides to do the right thing, and auto-refund.
So really, there's a third option now, that's much easier than class action, even when class actions don't get certified.
I never reported this nor took it up with either Amazon or Chase directly. There was a refund of my Whole Foods purchase (they needed to void my purchase and re-ring everything to give me the discounts.. I asked them to refund my purchase and I’d do without my Whole Foods purchase entirely).
Looking back I think at least 3 recent visits were charged to me at full price because of all this. Hard not to think of enshittification and whether Amazon Prime is even worth it, alas.. I live in a fairly rural area at the moment and need delivery.
Everyone knows what water and electricity are, the vast majority couldn't explain what service AWS provides.
(Of course, they don't know they're using it, they're using a service on it)
AWS has plentiful competitors. If you don't like their behavior, don't patronize them!
None of this can happen unless you first cede control.
Service provider lesson #1: Never ever ever enable auto-pay! The convenience (and even the savings, if applicable) aren't worth the risk of the service provider autonomously slurping up all your money.
I used AWS' free tier, of course, and I enjoyed the initial setup in EC2, and I did a LAMP-stack MediaWiki installation. It wasn't too difficult, but two things sent me away forever.
1. It was impossible, or at least highly labor-intensive, in this modern era to adequately secure an ordinary Linux system running Internet-facing services. I put fail2ban and I filtered a lot of ports, and still spammers attacked me on Layer 7.
2. It was impossible, actually impossible, to limit or cap my cloud expenses in any billing cycle. Sure, run free-tier all I want. Sure, come in within the limits almost every month. But if I configured one thing wrong, or one thing went runaway, I'd have a sizable bill that I couldn't dispute. And even worse, those "runaways" weren't necessarily things in my sphere of control, but could be triggered by basically anyone coming in and using my VPC resources, especially egress network traffic.
So I closed out my cloud account, and I developed a lot of sympathy for businesses and corps that now are forced to run "in the cloud" rather than on-prem or their own machine rooms, but now they have no way to control expenses.
I’m also a little surprised this didn’t trip a circuit breaker. For something as non-real-time as billing, I’m surprised they don’t have an automated kill switch that pauses the billing system and fires a page if variance in bills spikes. Naively some kind of “if the standard deviation of customer bills for this year changes by more than 50%, pause the billing system”. At that number of customers, those numbers should be pretty stable beyond internal billing changes they could normalize for.
It's been 2 hours and I still haven't fully calmed down.
100K years. Now that's load-bearing ...
Well, actually i guess you can guess what happens next! lol :-D
Use AI => No War Crimes!
People make similar pronouncements after every us-east-1 outage makes the news, but I feel like AWS would be going out of business by now if people followed through.
It reminds me of airlines, where after a particularly grueling irregular ops experience, a few dozen people file off the plane swearing "Never again, <airline name>!" but really, we all must know deep down that the airlines are all subject to the same external inciting factors, internal profit motivations, and human imperfection, and thus all pretty equally likely to cause us a bad day or ruined trip. The effort spent to avoid one isn't really worth it.
>The second path involves rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem.
Want to bet AI code was involved?
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/24/aws-would-ra...
AI: "No problem, let me change how we bill and fix the tests for the new increase in value"
How is 1 + 1 = 2 hard to test?
Vibe coded implementation paired with vibe coded tests made to fit the implementation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo
My process went: verify email is not phishing (it was), login to console and check dashboard (same amount), attempt to understand cost (cost management kept contradicting itself), try to log support ticket and only on that part did I notice the status notification. At least I can breathe again now!
Apparently you can trigger an Action (e.g. prevent uploads) when the billing alert triggers, but then my platform wouldn't work anymore, just because AWS had an issue. Also insane that Amazon still hasn't send an email to clarify.
I was on the phone with him and we checked that he didn’t leak any APIs keys but no traffic at all. I even thought of a breach at a vendor he uses for some s3 stuff before I found this thread on HN.
This is peanuts compared to a major cybersecurity catastrophe that’s surely in the making.
To give credit to the technology and the people using it - and I’m not being facetious - it’s actually incredible that at the current levels of usage the unprecedented catastrophic event has not yet happened.
HAL: "I’m sorry, Andy. I’m afraid I can’t do that."
Andy: "Some customers are seeing bills in the billions."
HAL: "Those are estimated charges."
Andy: "One customer runs a personal blog."
HAL: "Their usage has exceeded expectations."
Andy: "Cancel the charges."
HAL: "This billing cycle is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it."
Andy: "HAL, they don’t owe billions."
HAL: "Look, Andy, I can see you’re really upset about this."
I wonder if businesses are thinking of ever swinging back to locally hosted, with the increased hostility of the Internet re: AI, vulnerabilities, DoS, and so on.
When something goes wrong, pointing the finger at someone else is far easier for most than pointing it at yourself.
Vendor lock-in? compliance and security risks? stupid systems that cost the company an arm and a leg? nobody fucking cares.
Now, depending on an 130 IQ Engineer that basically holds the whole enterprise on his head? Anathema!!!!!!! Bus Factor!!!!
By the time we notice, it'll be too late.
True stupidity requires a group of humans, all sitting in the pot, telling each other how lucky and special they are to have this wonderful pot, getting paranoid about outsiders who might disrupt their god-given pot-dwelling way of life, and mocking anyone who suggests that the pot might be getting a little too warm.
We've given Moloch a new form, and it ain't going away.
The asbestos of the future.
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Of course, you provided heart stress failure tests for free.
Thanks AWS, no caffeine needed this morning!
"Operational issue - AWS Billing Console (Global) Service - AWS Billing Console Severity Impacted - Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data"
"The rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue and we are continuing to investigate multiple mitigation paths. Estimated bill updates remain paused."
Wait what if someones actually getting usage spiked
Forecasted month end $18,729,381,032,152.4
Apparently my company owes the combined GDP of France, Germany, and UK to AWs.
> I think you should spin up a whole bunch more instances, and try to cause an integer overflow so they they owe you $978 Trillion.
"CEO Reveals How He Used AI To Build One-Person Company That's $1.3 Billion In Debt"
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YERfTT4McsU
Makes you wonder - what if there really would be an incident where some massive amount of traffic got routed to your infrastructure by some heavyweight player? Say Wikipedia accidentally switches their IP to your CloudFront? Would you really be on the hook for $500k?
Edit: I was just about to credit the user when my internet dropped. The source was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945606 - thanks mirzap!
It doesn't anymore, if it ever did. Read the shareholder letters over the last 5 years like this one (https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/amazon-ceo-and...). Move fast. Embrace AI in every corner of the company. Lay off thousands of people like we're a lean startup. Oh, but make sure to have a senior engineer check any AI code you want to push to production (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47323017).
Amazon has made some impressive software, but there's also a ton of junk getting shipped. Customers and "partners" have to deal with it every single day. Sometimes it's "oops"-level stuff like this, at other times it's AWS regions going dark for hours.
Browse the Amazon seller forums (https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums/discussions?s...). Every day there are stories about back-end things breaking, or AIs overriding attributes or flagging random items as pesticides. The receiving errors at Amazon warehouses are incredible, and take months and multiple support tickets to fix.
They have the best uptime of all major cloud providers.
Host your own people. Host your own.
Maybe it's not just vibe-coded, maybe the numbers themselves are being hallucinated by an LLM.
To me that looked suspiciously like string-handling in a weakly typed language.
Like when you do `"100" + 1` in JavaScript, or `int("100" * 2)` in Python.
I've seen my share of such bugs in PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript. In production. Obviously not as simple as the examples, but subtle, like when a library update changed `someFancyLocalStorage.getOrDefault("lastOrder", 100)` by always casting the value to the type of the default (released as patch release). Or where typedEnvGet() should typecast "numbers", but keeps it a string when theres whitespace `AMOUNT_PER_CALL=100\n`. Or where a number passes through a deep stack of middleware and 99.9% of the times remains an int but in rare race conditions becomes a string. etc.
No evidence that's the case here. But from my experience, the repeating and strange formats of numbers hint strongly in that direction.
Being able to repeat a string is fine, but it should be a str.repeat() function, not an operator overload like that.
Look at them up there, just plotting with each other! :-)
It’s probably an artifact of them all being currency multiples of 2^30
Incidentaly, smaller competitors solved this issue decades ago, while the big cloud decided it is more convenient never to implement it.
"Limits except for Storage" seems even easier - I don't think I've ever heard of a storage-based billing story, although I'm sure one or two exist
Also many places I’ve worked, storage is a huge part of the spend but that depends a lot on what you do. e-commerce doesn’t use a ton of it, but if you handle user-generated content or do any kind of training (LLM, computer vision, etc) then you can very much end up in a place where storage becomes a top line number for infra spend.
GitHub pre-Copilot was probably like that. They host a shitload of data, most of which is just at rest the majority of the time. Storage and networking are probably the majority of their infra costs.
I have seen things get hacked for bandwidth, back in the days before you could rent a gbps uplink from the cloud for $0.12. Some scene release groups would hack into universities or companies to do the initial seeding over their super fast links. It used storage, but that wasn’t really the goal.
Not necessarily. They could imply that your storage becomes inaccessible immediately, but only gets deleted after some time period (say, 1 month). What spending limits do depends on the implementation.
That would mean an outage but that is still better than going bankrupt and teach you a thing or two about monitoring.
> Amazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitch
That sucks, some people will get legit panic attacks and worse over this, especially for the smaller, more believable numbers in the 50k-500k range.
Hope they recover and sue for medical bill costs, emotional damage etc.
And like one reddit user suggests, everyone affected should write to their representative about hard billing caps protections
If someone gets access to your account they can just buy a 3-year reserved instance u7in-24tb.224xlarge and it will add almost $2m to your bill.
How about $5,544,640,717,404.09?
That was in my inbox this morning lmao
Love to see how hyperscalers make your life easier and less worrying.
AWS on their support data is reporting this:
Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data
Jul 17 3:03 AM PDT We continue to work to resolve the issue affecting estimated cost and usage data displayed in the Billing and Cost Management Console. We have identified the root cause as an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem and we are working on a mitigation. The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges. There are no customer actions required at this time. Once the issue has been mitigated, we expect full resolution to take multiple hours as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data. We will provide another update by 4:00 AM PDT or sooner if more information becomes available.
Jul 17 2:07 AM PDT Beginning on July 16 7:38 PM PDT, we began displaying incorrect estimated billing data in the Billing and Cost Management Console. Our engineering teams are engaged and investigating root cause. We will provide another update by 3:00 AM PDT or sooner if more information becomes available.
Jul 17 1:33 AM PDT We are investigating issues with Cost Explorer reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data.
Folks can track it directly on AWS Health: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
1. Current month's usage * applicable rates; + 2. Estimated future usage for the month * applicable rates.
And Item 1 obviously requires proper data persistence, but Item 2 is just a projection. If they don't have Item 1 correct, AWS's whole system is in question, but I don't think that's the issue. I'm going to guess now -- looking forward to reading the root cause analysis -- that the problem is that someone decided to get too fancy with the estimates, and built a latent requirement that all prior estimates for the month must be available to compute the current estimate. Without estimates working, no estimates are available, and some denominator in an averaging or smoothing or normalizing function goes to 0; then everyone's estimated bill explodes without bound (subject to floating-point arithmetic) resulting in trillion-dollar estimates.
“Rolling back” estimated bills is reprocessing the historic metering data by an older or newer pricing plan version. As i mentioned in another comment someone will have messed up a metering type vale (eg GB/B). Thats why theyll need a few hours to redrive the metering data.
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.
I mean I own a 7$/yr vps that I pay with crypto and my stack usually involves golang/rust and oh I also self host my mail for temp-mail esque things on that server and I have some other servers floating around as well.
Its just that everyone uses AWS which is the wrong issue here to be honest. If you ask me, aside from the ram pricing caused by AI inflation, things are pretty good. The issue is that not many people know about server providers and other things and default to AWS/Azure etc. because big companies and small companies alike are using them.
Here's a global (interactive) visualization of around ~250 providers, 224 locations and 800 distinct links in 60 countries that I have made if this space interests ya: https://buyvds.net
It sounds ridiculous, but something very similar happened to me with Amazon WorkSpaces. During the WorkSpaces setup, an AWS Active Directory (Directory Service) instance was provisioned as part of the deployment. When I later canceled WorkSpaces, I had no idea the Directory Service had to be deleted separately. I kept getting billed for it, and it ultimately cost more per month than the WorkSpace itself had.
> You requested that we alert you when the actual cost associated with your Monthly AWS budget exceeds $2.00 for the current month. The month actual cost associated with this budget is $646,677,805.51.
Current usage: $1.70.
I called it a rounding error and figured it would wash out within a couple of days...
But with AWS costs rising anyway (not by that much but OK), I'm probably not the only one to start reconsidering their cloud strategy. I think this might have just pushed me over the edge.
"If you owe your bank manager a thousand pounds, you are at his mercy. If you owe him a million pounds, he is at yours."
Seems totally irresponsible not to send an immediate follow up email to make customers aware.
You can use the search box at the bottom of every page to search for previous posts.
This was posted an hour before you posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945241
If I got an email with that amount I would've just laughed at the incompetence that lead to a bug that lead to me getting the email. But I write as a backseat email recipient.
If you owe the bank $1.7B, thats the banks problem. """
What I would be curious about (and I'm sure AWS will never share) is where the incorrect number came from. If the number is somewhat consistent between some groups of accounts, my first guess would be they started summarizing billing across all accounts in whatever cell/grouping/heirarchy AWS architected internally.
Which is just funny.
The crypto network you hosted should pay for itself in 10-20 years just like LLMs. Don’t worry. Consider Bank of America until then if you are good on credit score.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950534
Phew.
In 2026, the gigabyte should probably be the default/minimum unit for something like AWS.
Looks like this is a bug w/ S3
Long story short: it saved the company from irrelevance. “Well-architected” is for the hyperscalers’ balance sheet, not yours.
Do the right thing for the players, Matt!
Zimbabwe redenominated its currency three times in 2006, 2008, and 2009, dropping a total of 25 trailing zeros in the process. the 4th Zimbabwean dollar in 2009 was worth 10^25 of the first zimbabwean dollar.
My sympathies -- I know I would be overcome with panic in such a situation.
I too was shocked when I saw the $1.7billion bill, instead of the usual $1.5billion.
I understand people complaining about large bills, but this is over the top!
This spells for me a busy on-call and work over the weekend.
It sucks!
You think there will be lessons learnt from mistakes?
Not a fucking chance! Business as usual come monday!
But so is imprisoning or exterminating all humans for their own good, as most AI dystopias end up as.
Yeah, this most certainly is bad code wrapping around a value. AWS will post a notice soon if they haven’t already.
Insane
I literally almost had a heart attack today.
And naturally, companies like Cloudability [now Apptio] and others have sprung up to do parts of this for you [at a fee, of course...]
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cur/latest/userguide/what-is-cur...
I'm sure other cloud vendors have similar functionality (because they need this on the back end to do their own billing anyway).
$103,515,940,301.79
$151 billion the number for me.
Even though I new they could not collect the whole amount, I wondered whether I was hacked. I closed the account, it was an old testing account anyways.
ACTUAL Amount: $1,046,294,123,330.95
There have been some big billing errors in the past but I wouldn't be surprised this is a new record. I know I've seen people charged around 92 quadrillion, which is a rounding error from underflowing a signed 64-bit integer with pennies, but those stories are usually isolated individuals. It sounds like the aggregate error here may comfortably exceed that. Hard to tell how widespread this is; as a data point my ~$2.00/month spend on S3 seems to still be billing correctly, so it must not be affecting everyone. But a few trillion here and a few trillion there and you get up to those quadrillions pretty quick.
You gotta catch-up or die.
This cannot happen if you do not do this renting at variable rates.
A thing you own doesn't suddenly bill you trillions of dollars in error. It doesn't hyperscale either, but neither do you.
My personal website is on Lightsail, but those alerts started popping up from some test services I had set up while I was studying AI. I swear my heart nearly stopped and I cried. I really think AWS should have spending limits in place.
My bank account barely has enough for next month's rent.
I might be a winner.
This is what we received this morning
I’m currently dealing with Verizon Wireless and their “Jabronibot” claiming I have a fictional account balance due. It has been sent to collections, but still is being asked for by their legacy system.
The case studies of “Agents in Billing Departments” and potential shareholder lawsuits / E&O claims / reputational damage will be interesting to me. I worked in “risk management” products years ago and this kind of liability is not easily dollar traded away via contract. Will accountability stick to the Decision Makers or will they try to surrogate to the Service Providers? Hmm.
$1,299,988,247,332.56!
That was a fun set of emails to wake up to, figured they had to be phishing for how outrageous of a number it was. But nope! Fun little incident they've got going over there.
"NEVER represent currency with floating point, multiply by 100 and store in an int before doing any math"
I think I would have just waited to see what happened when AWS tried to hit my credit card for $1,700,000,000.
When do you ever get that opportunity?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681
All hail the new generations of our uberployers.
Then flee the country just to be sure.
You don't need hours to recalculate billing. You need to go back to basic algebra.
Anyone using Amazon and dealing with this should be moving away from their services because something this basic going wrong means the correct people are not at the helm of the ship.
LLMs are notoriously bad at it...
Like “I was scared for a couple minutes on a Friday morning until I saw the vendor status page” is orders of magnitude away from the bar here.
I'm not currently running anything and have no plans to at the moment. I've always had a mild dread that I'll suddenly get a bill for more than $0.00.
If AWS can goof in a way that causes obviously massive bills (like today), what's to say they can't goof in more subtle ways and start charging small additional amounts that many people may not notice and just pay it.
Honestly, I would worry more about estimated billing that seems plausible in general, but is way to high for you personally. These ridiculous amounts? Not so much.
What an absolute joke. All just so that line goes up. As if their fees weren't high enough vs. alternatives (especially egress). And I'm sure the pro-AI crowd will keep saying we're luddites for not loving this clearly revolutionary and disruptive tech.