GoKawiilWTF?! Amazon has a reputation for squeezing customers for all they've got, but increasing billing prices from a couple of cents to $1.5 trillion really shows how Jeff Bezos got so rich. Thankfully, though, this was just an error by Amazon Web Services, but it still caused one customer's soul to leave their body, in their own words.
Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, received the sort of email most of us would rather not receive last week: an AWS alert informing him that he had accrued $1.5 billion in usage fees. Should he manage to win several lotteries and somehow pay it, he was still expected to face a $3 billion bill on August 1.
During the six years he'd been with AWS, his account had never exceeded $0.02 – most months his bill was just $0.01.
However, those figures were rookie numbers compared to what Dan Harvey, the head of marketing at the Hampshire-based Learning Through Landscapes, was billed.
Harvey told the Guardian that after his previous month's AWS bill came to 43 cents, he was especially surprised to find a bill for $7.8 billion. "I had to have a real dig around with our tech support team, while I was in full panic mode, trying to find what was going on in our account," he said.
There was also a student in Delhi whose regular monthly AWS bill of $1.28 increased to $10.9 billion.
Another user, Bharath, saw their bill rise an impressively large 745,728,201,771% from the previous month to $1.5 trillion. "I just saw $1.5tn on my AWS bill and my soul left my body," they wrote.
But the record seems to belong to the user who racked up a $7.1 trillion bill in service fees since July 1, which is more than double Amazon's market cap.
Amazon said that after 30 minutes of investigating, it determined that the root cause was "an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem." The company provided no further details but paused the bill estimation system.
AWS later said it was "rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem" and attempting to restore the last known good version of its estimated billing calculations.
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