A pricing bug in Amazon Web Services' billing system caused some customers to see estimated charges balloon from a few cents to millions or even billions of dollars, sparking widespread panic on social media and forums from Thursday evening. Amazon has confirmed the inflated figures were the result of an error in its estimated billing computation system and does not reflect customers' actual usage or charges, though the company was still working on a fix at the time of writing.

The AWS Service Health Dashboard attributed the fault to incorrect unit pricing within the billing estimate calculations. Amazon has paused estimated billing updates and is reverting the system to the last accurate data, a process it expects to take several hours, and says no action is required from customers. The glitch produced some extreme examples, including one Reddit user reportedly billed $4.2 trillion and another whose modest S3 storage usage generated a half-billion-dollar forecast; one user said they panicked and deleted everything in their account before learning it was a bug.