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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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 ...
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.
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This is invoicing? If ever there was a domain that was purely deterministic, you'd hope it was invoicing.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
"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"
> 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 ...
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?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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.
'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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!)
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!)
>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.
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….
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!!
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
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
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.
Tale as old as time. When I was coming up it took a $20-40/m investment to get a "dedicated" server that you could start tinkering around on. When you couldn't afford that, you bricked the family PC trying to figure out how to configure your own LAMP stack.
Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.
No not really, nobody has to be using AWS itself per se to be honest, there are still alternatives around.
I mean I own a 7$/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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"""
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.
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?
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
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.
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 :)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
$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”
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.
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.
This generation is too entitled! He should some learn responsibility by paying the full amount; otherwise Amazon should delete his services/data. Consequences!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No tests? Just mess up some mundane detail [1] and voila! Wake-up calls and heart attacks for 100,000s of administrators?
1: "Oh, well, this is not a mundane detail, Michael!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo
>no tests?
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
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.
> 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).
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?
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.
Who needs tests when you have vibes?
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Rube Goldberg machine attached with used bubble gum and somehow the bubblegum was chewed in all the wrong ways
Maybe they are former AWS employees for a reason and now want things to go better than they were at AWS.
"Former" seems to an important detail here.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, I am a former AWS employee.
I got put on Focus because my "contributions were not coming through" to leadership.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
Clearly some folks here have never worked at Amazon before. It's genuinely terrifying to see what most of the internet runs on.
I think billing is the only thing AWS doesn't really care about optimizing or putting enough tests to avoid anomalies lol.
They've already got anomaly detection: their users.
If only there was some way to get anomaly detection services [1] inside of AWS...
1: https://aws.amazon.com/what-is/anomaly-detection/
It’s fractions of a penny Peter.
It's just like in Superman III
Why would you think there are "no tests"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Technically, there could be a test. It could just be wrong!
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it...
[edit] Testing your tests, like testing your backups, is a good idea
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.
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.
I’d be concerned as it throws into doubt their entire accounting mechanism
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!
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.
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.
CSV files are widely known to be used by the most frugal companies so of course it is.
Have you seen what RDS costs‽ AWS couldn't possibly afford that!
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.
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.
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
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.
Was this the day that gp3 EBS volumes came out by any chance?
This is why I always fail loud rather than pick a stupid default.
Had it been half a million dollars or something or say like a few hundred dollars?
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."
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.
Degrees, very funny.
It's not difficult to write regression tests that catch unit mistakes.
One of the Mars landers famously failed due to unit conversion errors from metric to standard.
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)
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.
You just need to start teaching kids the metric system. Then when they'll grow up the switch will almost magically happen by itself.
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.”
Wasn't it (also?) the Ariane V flight in 1996? Oh, NVM, that was an overflow error.
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 ...
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.
Wanna bet the description of this job post will be updated by the end of the day?
"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..."
Wow:
This is invoicing? If ever there was a domain that was purely deterministic, you'd hope it was invoicing.The irony is, the only purely deterministic thing, will be token consumption...
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.
(token usage) is trending towards predictability for a lot of reasons. it's not deterministic but it's getting easier to reason about usage.
How can a random generator be deterministic?
Truth is, you can never know: https://imgur.com/random-number-generator-bwFWMqQ
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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
You have to do it when the customer list is too big to keep a counter per customer.
A probabilistic counter per customer is also a counter per customer. Still, probabilistic billing is an amusing thought though.
No you don't
This is like half of all job listings I've read recently. And it's a decent amount of fintech that's like this.
> 194,400.00 USD annually
Fuck it, im in.
Just wait until the same system runs payroll and you're getting paid $1.94400 annually.
I will just tell the HR bot that I am meant to be paid 1.944 billion.
10/10, no notes.
That's base, don't forget bonus and stock.
That job description feels so far beyond parody that I could scarcely believe it until opening the link! What a world.
It gets worst:
"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...
> 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.
If you can make the software cover the toil you save the staff for the tough cases.
They need to fire whoever is running AP and AP software development. Vibe invoicing is ridiculous for anyone to do, let alone Amazon.
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 ...
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.
> 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.
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?!
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.
Enterprise account . We got - 3trillion and change
-$3 trillion! That's the highest earning investment that has ever existed!
3.7 billion. Offered to pay it in monthly installments. Haven’t hears back
Quick do your IPO before the books update
It's true, if you're spending that much money you must be worth a ton! Just look at SpaceX!
same. over 2t in one day.
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.
Please do not open up emails directly always login to your account.
Yes, I am taking legal action, no doubt.
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.
Big numbers can lead to stress which can lead to all kinds of disorders.
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.
small numbers too....
:)
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.
…for emotional damage?
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.
Time to get a second job buddy.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
> 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.
Unfortunately not a choice at my organization
>> 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....
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!
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.
Would be funny if it wasn't so close to true
'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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
That is literally what Excel is for. Why didn't you use that first of all?
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?
When all you have is a hammer, but the hammer looks more like a swiss knife
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$
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 ;)
But 2^30 is 28.
Vibecoded the billing system, raised revenue 9000%. Great for that promo package.
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!
AI slop. Or just a distracted dev
>> Or just a distracted dev
And a distracted tester? And a distracted pipeline of regression tests?
No, the truth is way worst...
I'd love to see the spike in their projected earnings internal dashboard :)
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.
> 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.
What if there's only half a dev and a swarm of agents after the layoffs?
> only half a dev
That's one way to cut staff.
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.
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.
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.
If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $1.7 billion, that's the bank's problem.
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.
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
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!)
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 :-)
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.
Next question we'll find out is what if you owe the bank $1.7 trillion?
That's the government's problem
Not if you’re Elon Musk
Elon Musk is everyone's problem
AWS saw Anthropic billing a guy for $16 million on zero usage and thought, why stop at the millions?
https://www.techtimes.com/articles/320266/20260712/anthropic...
>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.
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….
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
AWS is basically a utility. I think it's inevitable that their carelessness around billing will end up with them being regulated like one.
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.
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)
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!
That’s why you always use a spend limited card with variable cost providers.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Just pay your bill Elon.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t know how something like this makes it to prod. That’s multiple levels of failure.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
With interest, of course.
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.
Were you still alive after paying it off?
No, but they have the internet in the afterlife, apparently.
They do, but the latency is terrible
> 100,000 years
100K years. Now that's load-bearing ...
Generational credit card debt.
That's good for the credit card company, they can project stable revenue 100k years into the future.
“Bank error in your favor, collect $100”
Vibe coding billing systems is a top-notch idea :)
Hey what do you think about vibe coding weapon systems? Do you want to be my cofounder?
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
Sure! What could possibly go wrong?
Drones are already vibe targeting in Ukraine/Russia.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
No, AWS won't go out of business, afterall, people still use IBM mainframes.
same
Maybe they're using too many humans and not enough AI in their software development. That must be it.
The code base is not gigantic enough they need AI to generate massively more lines of code.
But they're going to try anyway.
My guess is the GP swallowed a comma.
Your right! My misteak!
Well AWS never had bugs before.
They need the customers to pay more so they can fix the bugs. It's self-correcting.
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.
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.
Always messing up some mundane detail!
THIS IS NOT A MUNDANE DETAIL MICHAEL
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."
$1.7-billion isn't a mundane detail Michael!
you beat me before I refreshed the page. what would you say... you do here?
listen... i got agent skills.. im good at talking to agents!!
Vibes, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that ... I love the smell of Vibes in the morning.
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.
its like slowly boiling the frog
Or slowly boiling a human. The frog is actually smart enough to not fall for that.
Downvoted for truth. Frogs do indeed jump out of pots as they gradually get hotter. Humans are less likely to.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!!
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.
>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.
> Clearing LLMs out of our business infrastructure is going to be a massive undertaking.
The asbestos of the future.
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
"Operational issue - AWS Billing Console (Global) Service - AWS Billing Console Severity Impacted - Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data"
Update as of 7:53am PDT:
"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."
>Estimated bill updates remain paused
Wait what if someones actually getting usage spiked
Hackers rejoice!
Wow, those price increases due to the RAM and storage shortages AI caused are brutal.
Most likely they also forgot to include "make no mistakes" instructions to their in-house LLM that deploys to production.
Rookie mistake
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.
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.
"Have you considered using Reserved Instances? You could save up to 2 trillion dollars next month. Book a call with your AWS rep."
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.
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.
> other times it's AWS regions going dark for hours.
They have the best uptime of all major cloud providers.
Stop bragging, The Onion already reported on a one man company who is $1B in debt.
"CEO Reveals How He Used AI To Build One-Person Company That's $1.3 Billion In Debt"
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YERfTT4McsU
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.
One user posted a screenshot: https://prnt.sc/UqjcYD3RSQrS
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!
Wow, $139 B.
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?
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.
Cloud pricing has gotten ridiculous.
Host your own people. Host your own.
The old hypsters have to subsidize the new hypsters.
A guy on the sysadmin subreddit managed to 8x the global GDP https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_...
I liked this comment from that thread :)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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! :-)
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
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.
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.
How do we know if our bills were ever right if this made it into production?
That's the neat part, you don't!
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.
This just hit global news: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/17/amazon-we...
> Amazon Web Services customers receive bills for up to $1.5tn after global glitch
> 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
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.
1.5 trillion? Those are rookie numbers.
How about $5,544,640,717,404.09?
That was in my inbox this morning lmao
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.
Can you not set spending limits in AWS?
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.
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.
Big cloud didn't want to rewrite its billing systems from scratch to please its smallest customers.
With AI it should take like a weekend.
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.
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
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.
Storage-based billing stories. When an account is hijacked it's always for compute, not storage.
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.
They could do it; they don't want to.
What is a storage-based billing story?
Once upon a time in a cloud kingdom far, far away a big, beautiful bill was issued based on storage causing much disconcertion. Etc.
> 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.
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.
No wiggle room to come up with a workable solution. Let’s go shopping instead.
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.
No, alerts but not limits.
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.
he did, 140 billion :D
If you owe AWS 140B dollars its their problem ;)
Cynically I wonder if this has an outcome as an unintentional (or intentional) anchoring exercise for future cost increases
I hope they're not planning for that large of a cost increase.
That’s the smoking gun. Should have used gigabytes instead of bytes. Thank you for pointing me at the issue.
I feel much better after seeing the $B estimates here; I only have an estimate of $34M so far
Folks can track it directly on AWS Health: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
It's ok, I owe them 1.22 trillion.
Maybe you went over 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 twice and came back to positive.
Peanuts
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...
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.
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.
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
Looks like they set up a LLM to estimate billing?
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.
They have to pay for that AI Capex buildout somehow
Yes, I've got an estimated bill of $4bn. Probably related to the ongoing "Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data" incident?
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
I was actually in the toilet when I got an email I owe them $36,869,876,146.51. I literally just shit myself.
Ok, back to $0.17 :D
Mine was about the same and evoked a similar response.
I got one for 8 billion while I was eating lunch. Thankfully I managed to not vomit.
Tale as old as time. When I was coming up it took a $20-40/m investment to get a "dedicated" server that you could start tinkering around on. When you couldn't afford that, you bricked the family PC trying to figure out how to configure your own LAMP stack.
Nowadays you just have to risk accidentally billing your parents CC the tune of multi-generation wealth to get that real-world experience.
Hetzner has hard usage cutoffs
No not really, nobody has to be using AWS itself per se to be honest, there are still alternatives around.
I mean I own a 7$/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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
AWS pushed the wishful thinking internal calculator to production.
A couple of relevant links: - AWS Status Page: https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status - Reddit Thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/1uyuaw7/help_my_bill_s...
AWS revenue for 2025 was $128.7 billion, so I'd say probably a bug.
Double your yearly revenue with this simple trick…
Vendor-locked customers _hate_ him!
""" 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.
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?
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 ?
I made something that tries to highlight the humor regarding this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950534
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.
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
Just got a budget alert that I owe $286,486,223.88 on a hobby aws account, almost got a heart attack.
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
Good news is you finally qualify for Enterprise Support and you've never been closer to a Series B.
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.
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.
$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.
I was at $5 trillion, on the way to $9 trillion!
Yes, an incident is ongoing https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Should have used Fable.
Just pay it and move on. No need to cause a scene.
https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status
Looks like this is a bug w/ S3
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!
I just deleted my aws account. I don't need these vibes in my life.
Help, what is this number - US$87,967,679,887,258.36
That's 87 trillion, 967 billion, 679 million, and so on.
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?
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.
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.
Lol, Friday deployment is a bad omen even with LLM. Some things are just unchangeable facts of life.
My first thought was "Oh hell, who left the NAT Gateway on?"
Maybe this is a new strategy to scare people into finally locking down their old, unused AWS accounts. It sure worked for me!
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.
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.
It's okay. They are market leaders. And we use their services cause we can trust that they know what they are doing.
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.
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.
You're not working hard enough if your AWS bill isn't $1.7B.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681
Same here. Usually $0.15 per month, current bill is $15.4 billion.
I went from 0.03€ to $8B.
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!
Glad I saw this. Mine said I racked up $400B yesterday. My usual spend is $15.
THis is why I hate API/usage pricing
“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.
Need some money for a new Launchpad
Only 1.7? I got $55B up from 41 cents.
I literally almost had a heart attack today.
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...
Aws has created more unicorns than any accelerators.
hmm, if these estimates of Amazon profit for the next quarter are correct Bezos is set to become a trillionaire! Take that Musk!!
Total forecasted cost for current month $477,000,039,440.24
Insane
Hope they’re using 64 bits to store these prices
float will have to do it.
I also like the percentual change, that is a lot of comma's.
Funny how these errors always go one direction.
Golden era of software productivity they say
Look how much money AI is making.
We finally found the ROI!
Is it even possible to audit the cloud pricing? They just give us a number and we pay.
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...]
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).
I almost got a heart attack seeing a bill for 48B USD!
I have $13,034.40, while not having used AWS for the last 8 months. Not as much but still crapped my pants
And to think the federal government claims inflation is in the single digits this year!
Well, no coffee needed this morning.
$103,515,940,301.79
Our S3 bill for a single day was $48 trillion
The panic was real. We read about keys getting stolen all the time. Was about to nuke my set up too.
$44 trillion over here, at least our bill was so outrageously high that I just laughed
Does the affiliate program still work for AWS? When do I get my referral fee?
This is a strong argument to either self host or work really hard to be cloud agnostic.
Aw man I was hoping to punk my manager but our cost estimates are unaffected.
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!
Who else had LinkedIn posts about this flashing before your eyes?
This is just Anthropic reaching out to their customers for help with their AWS bill.
Seems like a scam. Call your CC company and issue a chargeback :p
I got 109 billion - am I the winner?
Sorry mate, $241,946,798,744.75 for Glacier here.
Depends. Did you also get a free heart attack?
This is real risk. Someone could really have a serious health problem.
Go turn off autopay now! For personal accounts anyway
What an `effin disaster. The alert almost gave me a heart attack.
Our alert was for exceeding $300...by several hundred billion dollars.
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.
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
Yeah, small timers, I only got $4,4T. How will I finance this?
MMT!
Unfortunately, it's only Amazon that can issue bills backed by that debt, not the GP.
$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”
at $1.7 billion, that unit conversion error is now the most expensive TODO comment in software history
Lucky. I’m on the hook for 54 billion (and change).
Looks like you are the biggest shareholder. Well, going by the popular saying: “You own AWS now”.
The new data centers are more expensive:
ACTUAL Amount: $1,046,294,123,330.95
The market *hates* this one weird trick to juice earnings
Some guy named Claude screwed up.
Our org account's bill is showing up as > 100 trillion.
You've got to grab a screenshot of that.
Nothing like generational debt to kick off a Friday morning
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.
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.
It looks like AI is completely done.
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.
it seems like these types of problems have gained frequency in the ai era, or is it just recency bias?
FinSlops.
Have even seen a $9.2 trillion for a friend.
$250 billion. Nearly died right then and there
Amazon, the first quadrillion-dollar company.
I prefer to just pay...
I hope you have auto pay disabled
Just got mine. $534,366,582,647.75
Shocking! That seventy five cents is suspicious.
yeah the AI read billionaring instead of billing
I expect such incidents like this to continue. So please keep vibe coding.
This generation is too entitled! He should some learn responsibility by paying the full amount; otherwise Amazon should delete his services/data. Consequences!
VibeBilling, love it
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.
Curious if it's just s3 costs or other services as well?
for me it was s3 cost only
Yea, same here. $420M+ bill, when we have <10$ per month usually.
$627,487,837,871.49
I might be a winner.
Vibe coded fix, resulted in many having multi billion bills. Claude really did it this time.
How much is that in kidneys?
A lot.
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
now it is fixed for me as well. issue is still open in aws health center though
Wild.
The charge-back penalties are going to be hilarious and hopefully bankrupting.
> $5,544,640,717,404.09
This is what we received this morning
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.
Yes I received an 2.8m USD budget alert.
I think I know how Bezos plans to pay for his Billion dollar AI costs.
In an .md file somewhere:
"NEVER represent currency with floating point, multiply by 100 and store in an int before doing any math"
I just invested ALL my money into AMZN cause next earnings report will be FIRE :)
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.
Results of vibe coding and vibe configurations.
Imagine the chaos if, as people sometimes suggest should happen, AWS shut down running instances in accounts that exceeded a billing threshold..
Mine was a mere $49B. Fucking idiots.
Cheap!
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?
So long as customers are good for it, AWS is about to crush earnings!
AMZN Q2 numbers are in, and it turns out they're going to Goldman Sachs the AI bubble.
Rife.
If its less than 2 billion is likely to be real :-) I would relax only if its in the trillions ...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48945681
File a GDPR request to have your account deleted.
Then flee the country just to be sure.
I guess on the plus side I'm $1.7B better off so I can retire...
Is AWS in their "move fast and break things" era ?
Lumber along and smash stuff
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.
Same, i am now a slave to Jeff Bezos to the end of my life.
storage, compute cost is increasing AWS be like lets increase prices
Imagine it not being a bug...
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.
Time to become a shepherd in some remote mountains.
Surprise hyperinflation. Check the breadshelves!
I got estimated costs of $56.something billions. Usually ~$100/month. My heart rate currently still sits at around 160 bpm. Motherfuckers.
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.
someones been dognfooding the AI too muxh
aws becoming first quadrillion dollars company
invoicemaxxing
Fast and loose with billing data. Welcome to the new Amazon.
a billion here, a billion there, sooner or later it adds up
brb, off to buy some AMZN
this counts towards ARR right? would be stupid not to
Uhh class action incoming? $34,909,930,575.09 over here.
What would your damages be? They’re not actually going to charge your credit card for 34 billion.
I could see someone sadly taking their own life over this.
I mean, emotional damages are a thing right?
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.
I wonder how many people died of heart attack when they saw this.
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.
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.
Pff rookie numbers, mine was 375 billion.
Small potato's sir, my bill > GDP of Switzerland. A cool $1.2T
I was at $5 trillion, on the way to $9 trillion.
you too with Fable huh?
You didn't have savings opportunities enabled
Rookie error
I blame A.I. usage
eh your typical off-by-7 (zeros) programmer mistake
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, this is only considered an error if the account is unable to pay. /s