Cloud customers receive erroneous bills worth billions from Amazon

A surprise billing estimate that showed some customers owing billions in cloud computing costs sparked a frantic response from Amazon Web Services (AWS) on Friday.

Amazon confirmed that it's trying to resolve a bug in its AWS billing portal, which began showing inaccurate billing data as of late Thursday. By Friday morning, the company conceded that the 'rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.' Amazon said the change relates to its billing computation subsystem.

The good news for the customers who were told they 'owe' millions or billions to Amazon are likely off the hook. The billing estimates 'do not reflect actual usage and charges,' Amazon said.

Several screenshots posted by Amazon customers on Reddit showed a customer being quoted a billing estimate of close to $2.5 billion for this month's AWS usage, while others had similar alerts, ranging from a few million dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars.

A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately return a request for comment. The issue is expected to last several more hours, per Amazon's status page.

According to Amazon, the billing estimates are not based on actual usage and charges, and customers are not responsible for the incorrect amounts. Amazon's customers can expect accurate billing once the issue is resolved.