Amazon Web Services experienced a global glitch that caused incorrect estimated billing data to be displayed to customers. The billing console began displaying incorrect estimated billing data on Thursday, July 16 at 10:38 PM ET (3:38am UK time on Friday).

Web Services identified the root cause as an issue with unit pricing within the estimated billing computation subsystem. The company stated that the billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges. In response to the error, Web Services shut off the bill estimation system and paused estimated billing computations.

The technical issue produced estimated bills that ranged from millions of dollars to $1.5 trillion for some customers. Web Services apologized for any confusion and concern around these costs. The company stated it is rolling back a recent change to the billing computation subsystem and attempting to revert to its last known good estimated bill computation. Web Services stated that full resolution is expected to take multiple hours and that there are no customer actions required at this time.

Dan Harvey, head of marketing at Learning Through Landscapes, usually pays less than £1 per month but received an estimated bill of $7.8bn (£5.8bn). "I almost had a heart attack when I received an email alert from Amazon Web Services with the billing for our charity’s school grounds audit app, which usually costs us less than a pound per month," Harvey said. Sachin, a student in Delhi, usually pays $1.28 a month but was billed $10.9bn during the outage.

Andrea Zuvich, who runs a website called The Seventeenth Century Lady, usually pays around $15 a month but was informed her bill had reached $245bn. Bill Radjewski, who runs CollegeFootballData.com, usually pays $0.01 per month but received an alert for more than $1.5 billion in usage fees.

A user named Bharath posted on X that his usage was up and his bill showed $1.5tn. "I just saw $1.5tn on my AWS bill and my soul left my body," Bharath said. One Reddit user posted a screenshot showing $7.1 trillion in service fees since July 1.

Web Services is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing platforms on a metered pay-as-you-go basis. The service was established in 2006. The display of inaccurate financial data affected customers globally, ranging from individual students to charity organizations, showing the reliance on accurate cloud infrastructure billing systems.