Waking up to a routine cloud invoice is one thing. Waking up to an email saying you owe more than $1.5 billion is quite another. That is exactly what happened to Bill Radjewski, the person behind CollegeFootballData.com, who opened his inbox to an alarming alert from Amazon Web Services and learned that his usage fees had somehow crossed the billion-dollar mark, with his August 1 statement projected to climb past $3 billion.
The figures were absurd on their face. Radjewski has held the account for more than six years, and by his own account his monthly charges have never once topped two cents. He backed that up with screenshots of his three most recent monthly invoices, each of which came to a grand total of $0.01. "I've had this account for 6+ years and in that time my monthly spend has never exceeded $0.02," he said.
He was far from the only one
Replies flooding the AWS Support account on X made it clear the problem was widespread. Other customers were staring at equally ridiculous quotes: $22 billion for one, $75 billion for another, $110 billion for someone else. The mood online swung between panic and dark humor. "Blud why did you hit me with a cost of 5 million USD what did I even do," one rattled user wrote.
What Amazon says went wrong
Amazon spokesperson Aisha Johnson pointed to the AWS Service Health Dashboard for details. The company did not put a figure on how many accounts were hit, but the dashboard flagged the problem as "global." According to that same dashboard, the billing console "began displaying incorrect estimated billing data" on Thursday, July 16, at 10:38 pm EDT.
Engineers started digging in roughly six hours later. They traced the root cause to "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem," though no further detail was offered about what actually broke. In later updates, the company said it was "rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem," trying to restore its "last known good estimated bill computation," and that it had "paused estimated billing computations" in the meantime.
No need to panic, or pay
Amazon expects everything to be sorted out by the weekend and stressed that "there are no customer actions required at this time." In other words, nobody is actually on the hook for these cartoonish sums. Some customers chose to lean into the absurdity instead. One Reddit poster shared a "cost and usage overview" in the AWS subreddit showing $7.1 trillion in service fees run up since July 1, a figure more than double Amazon's entire market value.
