Amazon Web Services gave users a heads-up early Friday that seemed innocent enough. On its status page was this warning: "We are investigating issues with Cost Explorer reflecting inaccurate estimated billing data."
Then the billing alerts came. Users of the oldest and largest public cloud service began getting estimates for July reaching into the billions and even trillions of dollars.
Kyle Galbraith, a software developer in France, received a $34 billion estimate. He had a monthly budget cap of $36 set.
"AWS owes me a lifetime subscription to underwear now," he posted on X.
Others claimed they have estimated July billings of over $1 trillion. "I just saw $1.5 trillion on my AWS bill and my soul left my body," wrote another X user.
AWS referred Barron's to the cloud service status page when asked for comment.
The latest update, at 10:53 a.m. Eastern Time, says: "We continue to work to resolve the issue affecting estimated cost and usage data displayed in the Billing and Cost Management Console, including the Cost and Usage Report.
"The rollback of a recent change did not resolve the issue and we are continuing to investigate multiple mitigation paths. Estimated bill updates remain paused. We are in the process of reverting to the last accurate estimated billing data. The displayed billing estimates do not reflect actual usage and charges. There are no customer actions required at this time.
"We expect this mitigation to take several hours to complete as we work through recomputing the estimated billing data. We will provide another update by 10:00 AM PDT or sooner if more information becomes available."
Write to Adam Levine at adam.levine@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 17, 2026 11:34 ET (15:34 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.