Amazon Web Services displayed wildly erroneous bills to customers worldwide on Friday, with invoices that normally run a few cents to a few dollars suddenly showing figures as high as $1.5tn after a billing glitch. Bogus figures began appearing on the AWS cost-management console around 3:38am UK time, and the company shut off its estimated-billing subsystem about 90 minutes later after tracing the fault to a unit-pricing error, apologizing for the confusion and concern. Affected users ranged from a UK charity whose usual sub-£1 bill hit $7.8bn to a Delhi student billed $10.9bn, though none were actual charges, and AWS said a full fix would take several hours while it recalculates the erroneous billing estimates.
