Наталя ХандусенкоHot News
20 July 2026, 11:58
2026-07-20
"I almost became the owner of the largest data center in the world": Ukrainian developer received an astronomical bill from AWS for $3.5 billion
Ukrainian Java developer Olesia Smagliy’s morning began with a shock: the cloud service Amazon Web Services (AWS) sent her a notification about exceeding the budget and issued a bill for an astronomical amount — over $3.5 billion. Since a card with all the IT worker’s savings was tied to the account, this news made her seriously worried. And this is not an isolated incident.
Ukrainian Java developer Olesia Smagliy’s morning began with a shock: the cloud service Amazon Web Services (AWS) sent her a notification about exceeding the budget and issued a bill for an astronomical amount — over $3.5 billion. Since a card with all the IT worker’s savings was tied to the account, this news made her seriously worried. And this is not an isolated incident.
When Olesya opened the email and checked the billing details on the AWS website, she saw the exact figure for the expected bill — $3,577,815,368.16, she told LinkedIn.
The developer decided to calculate how many resources would need to be used to get such a check. According to her rough calculations, at a standard rate of $0.023 per 1 GB, she would have to store about 130 exabytes of data in the cloud. According to Olesya, this volume would be enough to place photos of everyone on the planet, all of Google, Netflix, a backup copy of the Internet, and still leave some space for her own pet project.
Fortunately, the story ended well: AWS later officially reported a technical failure (Inaccurate Estimated Billing Data). It was a billing system error, not a real debt, so no one was going to write off billions from the developer’s card.
«So, it seems I didn’t become the owner of the largest data center in the world by accident after all,» the developer joked.
This curious incident is far from unique. In recent days, a wave of similar stories from Ukrainian IT professionals has swept across LinkedIn.
A similar story, but with a slightly smaller bill, was shared by DevOps engineer Oleksiy Kudrya. Aityvets received a letter from AWS stating that the projected costs for the current month were an astronomical $280,416.
Alexey spent the next half minute in a daze, feverishly recalling details about this account: when he last logged in, whether he created access keys, whether two-factor authentication was enabled. The thing is that the engineer had not used this profile for over two years. All services there had been deleted, except for the single S3 bucket in the Ohio region, where only two technical files .terraform.lock.hcl were stored for fixing Terraform provider versions.
After making sure that the old access keys were inactive, there were no third-party profiles, and the two-factor protection was working reliably, the engineer started writing a ticket to support. However, the story had a happy ending on the support page: an official message appeared there about a global failure in the subsystem for calculating expected billing. AWS confirmed that the displayed amounts were erroneous and did not correspond to the actual resource consumption.
