Ask HN: Any AWS billing issues known? Amazon forecast of 3 billion dollars
I receive an AWS Budgets alert that my budget is exceeding the alert threshold. Threshold is 5$. Forecasted amount is listed as $3,005,575,870.47. (Yepp, right, that’s 3 billion dollars.) I haven't even used AWS actively in the last year, but AWS console lists the amount as stated above. No feedback from AWS support yet, but the support AI chat bot says: "Die perfekt gleichmäßigen Tageskosten seit dem 1. Juli deuten stark auf einen Abrechnungs- oder Messfehler hin." ("The perfectly consistent daily costs since July 1 strongly suggest a billing or metering error.") Bot created a support ticket (or at least told me so). Anyone else seeing something like this? Already disabled all AWS IAM roles and deleted all other AWS resources I know of. AWS login not hacked as far as I can tell. But owing Amazon 3 billion dollars is a bit of a concern. Any ideas?
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
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
Far less scary than a smaller amount
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?
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.
Reminds me of the time a Robinhood user killed themselves after Robinhood erroneously showed their account balance at -$730k.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55990461
In that case, they settled with Robinhood and FINRA fined Robinhood 70 million dollars.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/01/business/robinhood-lawsui...
"They" being the family; Robinhood couldn't settle with the guy who was wronged because he, ya know, killed himself first
Ah, there'll be something in the TOS absolving them of responsibility.
Well... That depends on the country jurisdiction. And any ToS is bounded by law and can be questioned.
Maybe AWS is also “for entertainment purposes only”
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/05/copilot-is-for-entertainme...
Worth a shot to give them a call and explain that. They can probably adjust it down to 100 billion.
What is this, US health care negotiations?
https://health.amazon.com/prime
https://health.amazon.com/prime
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.
huge irl laugh at “i don’t have 437 billion dollars”
Clearly the Agentic AI is running free on AWS. Matt does it again...what a success...
Same story for $500 million. I was shaking so bad I couldn't type my password.
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.
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.
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?
Is it still a bet if you have 99.999% chance to win?
Can I bet you 437 billion dollars?
>Spawning Sub-Agent: "Dr. Evil"
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.
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:
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/02/24/aws-would-ra...
They'll never admit it.
Why would they? Changing colors on the status dashboard needs VP approval.
User: "I want to improve the billing system to be more efficient and só we can earn more money"
AI: "No problem, let me change how we bill and fix the tests for the new increase in value"
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.
Yeah, buy less cappuchinos and avocado toast so you can pay your AWS bills people!
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.
My estimate was only $21M (vs ~$0.01 average bill). Wish I had checked status sooner and saved myself the panic!
My process went: verify email is not phishing (it was), login to console and check dashboard (same amount), attempt to understand cost (cost management kept contradicting itself), try to log support ticket and only on that part did I notice the status notification. At least I can breathe again now!
same process, same near heart attack - especially some days ago I had malicious activity on my platform and thought that now they actually found something.
Apparently you can trigger an Action (e.g. prevent uploads) when the billing alert triggers, but then my platform wouldn't work anymore, just because AWS had an issue. Also insane that Amazon still hasn't send an email to clarify.
A friend of mine went through the same - he got an alert for bill over budget, he logged in and boom 107M$.
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.
Yes, there is a known issue with cost estimation.
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Thank you. Have seen this after I posted.
Thanks, I panicked logged in and could not find the root cause of the bill.
Thanks AWS, no caffeine needed this morning!
Bit of an understatement: “The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges.”
"There are no customer actions required at this time."
Of course, you provided heart stress failure tests for free.
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.
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.
If they did allow hard spend caps, it sounds like today would be a global outage.
Well then hopefully next time they'll be a bit more careful when shipping billing code updates!
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?
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.
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.
Hey man AI makes mistakes sometimes that’s why you need to double check the output.
Someone I know woke up this morning to over 3 trillion dollars.
Love to see how hyperscalers make your life easier and less worrying.
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.
> Anyone else seeing something like this?
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
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.
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.
My estimate was over 2T. Talk about waking up quickly...
For science I hope people are trying to figure out now how they could manage to rack up a 2T bill in a month.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you so much! I just woke up, and saw budget alert email for a dormant account to use $434,896.90. I haven't gotten so awake so fast in such a long time.
I would not be so relaxed...Your estimate is so low that is likely to be real :-) You should only be relaxed if its in the Trillions...+
In moments like these I'm reminded of all the people who have committed suicide due to billing errors. This is completely unacceptable. These sorts of errors must _never_ happen.
At some point my role was to reduce our startup’s AWS bill. I managed to keep 7 figures on our books instead of handing it to AWS. But a message like that would have given me a heart attack in those days.
Long story short: it saved the company from irrelevance. “Well-architected” is for the hyperscalers’ balance sheet, not yours.
I seem to have spend >35trilion on rds today, sooo yeah, going great at AWS
Me too, hello all. I've got 59 Million dollars in billing threshold reached email from AWS. And felt the same as others, and after half an hour of investigation I saw their message on top of the support page. I have 6 mb for static website stores in S3. No other resources.
If I can expect to be penalized for not paying my legitimate bills, companies should also be penalized for failing to implement common-sense reasonable safeguards that prevent them from slapping their consumers with such absurdities.
Vibe Billing
Who is going to compensate us for the years taken off our lives when we received the alerts?
Yeah nearly had a heart attack this morning. Thought keys were leaked for a sec.
My Budget is 10$. 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.
They should have added "make no mistakes" to the prompt.
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.
Prompt: bill our aws customers, make no mistakes.
or: Increase revenue!
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.
Prompt: investigate new ways to fund additional AI datacenters.
"If you owe AWS a hundred thousand dollars, that's your problem. If you owe AWS three billion dollars, that's Amazon's problem."
Got a message that I owe 37 million on an account that I haven't used in probably...6 years?
Mines was $190,594,974,587,761.20 :)
Heard of somebody who got 19 quadrillion dollars - I thought they meant Zimbabwean dollars
That would have been a great deal!
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.
For history here, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_Zimbabwe
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.
Did it recover for you folks? I still see billions of dollars!
Yes seeing the same, so far no response from AWS support
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.
vibe coding for the win.
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.
131 billion for me
I mean 3 billion USD is clearly too big to fail, so I wouldn't worry too much
did it recover for you? I still see billions
Mine has
thx, when? Was it only last day or the whole month of July was inflated?
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.
>> Literal basic fucking math, Amazon
LLMs are notoriously bad at it...
Maybe they accidentally used the Argentine peso ;)
Less hyper-scaler, more hyper-inflation