Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers woke up on Friday, July 18, 2026, to alarming billing estimates claiming they owed millions or even billions of dollars for cloud services they had never used. Amazon confirmed it is working to resolve a bug in the AWS billing portal responsible for the erroneous figures.
According to Amazon’s status page, the company began detecting inaccurate billing data late Thursday. By Friday morning, Amazon acknowledged that an attempted fix had failed, stating that a “rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue.” The company traced the problem to its billing computation subsystem.
Screenshots shared by affected customers on Reddit showed one user quoted a billing estimate of nearly $2.5 billion for the current month’s AWS usage. Other customers reported estimates ranging from several million to hundreds of millions of dollars.
Despite the alarming figures, Amazon said the inflated estimates “do not reflect actual usage and charges,” suggesting customers shown the erroneous bills are unlikely to be held responsible for the amounts displayed. As of Friday, Amazon’s status page indicated the issue was expected to persist for several more hours. A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Source: TechCrunch