HACKER Q&A
📣 ent101

Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?


I just logged into my AWS account and I noticed every charge has doubled for my September usage, literally overnight!

I called AWS and they said this has been reported by multiple people and they still don't know how many accounts are affected, did this happen to you too?


  👤 dpeterson Accepted Answer ✓
I opened a service ticket. My ec2 instances have somehow been running for over 950 hours in one month. I can go back and see my instances run for 744 hours (what i'd expect in a month) in previous months. Amazon invented more hours than actually exist in a month for billing purposes. Bezos is a genius! I should have thought of that!

👤 donarb
I just received this email from Amazon on Thursday afternoon, this may be related:

"We are notifying you that we incorrectly issued an early invoice for your September AWS usage on September 18th. As your card was charged successfully for this invoice, we are currently processing a refund for the unexpected charge. The refund generally takes 3-5 business days to be received by your bank and some banks may require additional processing time. Your full monthly usage will be invoiced through our normal billing process on or around the 3rd of October. We will send another notification when your correct September invoice is available. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this error.

There is no action required from you, but if you have any questions, please contact the AWS Customer Service Team by visiting: https://aws.amazon.com/support, and opening a case by selecting 'Create Case'. You can then select ‘Account and Billing Support’ , followed by ’Billing’ for the Service, and ‘Charge Inquiry’ for the Category."


👤 hanoz
Mine is showing as roughly twice what I'd expect it to be on the billing home page. It looks about right on the cost explorer though.

I got an alert for crossing a billing threshold only five hours ago, as expected for this time of the month; now the total is just under double that.

It's quite an intriguing error. I'm struggling to imagine how it might have come about.


👤 KenanSulayman
Yes, seeing the same on the Billing & Cost Spend Summary; but the correct amounts are displayed in the AWS Cost Management dashboard [0].

[0] https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-reports/home#/dashboard


👤 gwillen
I was also seeing a surprising cost of about twice what I expected, but since I rarely use AWS I was assuming I had just calculated it wrong somehow. It's maddeningly difficult to see your usage history of services -- I still can't figure out how to see what my EC2 usage was this month. There is something called the "cost explorer" which I can't use yet, because apparently it takes 24 hours to set up (?), and it's not even clear that it will include my historical activity when it's ready...

👤 meritt
Yes, just saw this too. This is showing across all service types for me. Anything that is billed based on a unit of time has exactly 2x the consumption than has happened so far month-to-date.

👤 Pfhreak
My website bill rose to exactly double. It's still only a dollar, but that's twice what I was paying last month!

👤 shadiakiki
"isitfit" (https://isitfit.autofitcloud.com) is a downloadable command-line tool that calculates billed usage of EC2 instances from the number of running hours over the last 90 days. You could reconcile it against the EC2 section in your AWS bill. To download it, use `pip3 install isitfit` and then just run the command `isitfit`. It's free and open-source at https://github.com/autofitcloud/isitfit

Edit: On a side-note, this week is the global climate strike week (https://globalclimatestrike.net/). Consider running `isitfit --optimize` to identify underused EC2 instances, downsize them, and use the saved money to save the planet.


👤 captkos
Yeah something is crazy.. I killed a bunch of service content and my cost STILL seems to be going up.. My bill for this month (even after the reduction) is going to be almost 85% higher than last month with the same level of activity.

👤 iconara
Is anyone still seeing problems like this? I found duplicate entries in our Parquet CUR reports, but not in the CSV versions (we export both, for reasons). The duplicates were from 24 September beween 00:00 and 13:00 UTC and only for Usage and DiscountedUsage. Not limited to EC2, though, it was Redshift, CloudWatch, and a lot of other services too.

👤 johneke
I wonder if AWS is prepping for a pricing hike but someone was trigger happy with the big red button :D

👤 azdacha
This is absolutly not related, but on a funny note, I got subribed to prime forcefully last month.

I'm highly suspicious toward Amazon behaviour now. This kind or news only flurish the idea that Amazon has taken it's first steps toward being a total a company.


👤 cbsks
Whenever I hear news like this, part of me feels bad for all the programmers working very long hours to fix the problem. You can be sure that a lot of pagers started to go off as soon as the reports of billing issues started to come in.

👤 captkos
I got a response back and my time was corrected (quick glance).. I will be more thorough from this point on. But for me the quick and dirty is comparing to the previous months bill.. Normally is enough, except for this month.

👤 hdpq
I'm showing double the amount of hosted zones in Route 53. Kind of odd

👤 sashavingardt2
Mine doubled. Got a non sensical reply from AWS. Now back to normal.

👤 jared_nyc
Same here. Just checked my Org consolidated bill.

Every service looks to be about double, However if you go to the Cost & Usage report, it looks right.


👤 phyzome
I usually get billed 54 to 58 cents per month. It's showing me 70 cents for the current month, for a projected 91 cents!

👤 guitarnick
We were just about to submit a ticket when the forecast/breakdown returned to normal. Looks like fixes are rolling out.

👤 agotterer
About an hour ago I received a refund receipt from AWS for the extra charge. So it seems like they are addressing the issue.

👤 dgemm
It is a mistake in the billing console.

👤 jayzalowitz
Are you at an account anniversary? What does the service broken down billing say your biggest cost is?

👤 edwhitesell
No issues on bills of two orgs I have access to. Cost Explorer shows data as it should too.

👤 raverbashing
I think it might have charged people for free-tier eligible usage as well

I've seen it happen


👤 peterburkimsher
We had a problem with malware mining Bitcoin on our AWS instance a few weeks ago:

https://www.cybereason.com/blog/new-pervasive-worm-exploitin...


👤 encoderer
Oh no somebody ran the cron job twice.

Call me, aws. I can help. I know cron jobs.


👤 k__
From 1 to 2€? Maybe...

👤 AimForTheBushes
Yep, exactly double.

👤 brendanw
Yup, I am seeing double as well.

👤 TruffleLabs
Thanks for the heads up. Our AWS costs were definitely up almost 30% for this month! Checking billing details...

👤 cochne
Yep this happened to me.

👤 meow_mix
i can't wait for this COE

👤 devoply
There was recently an error where AWS send the bill twice and then sent an apology e-mail. It may have something to do with this.

👤 tayleeganj
Lol will have to check for a coe