An empty storage bucket ran up a $1,300 bill in one day.

In April 2024 a developer created a private Amazon S3 storage bucket for a test. It was empty, yet within a day it received about 100 million requests from other people's misconfigured systems. AWS billed him more than $1,300, even though every request was rejected. AWS cancelled the bill and later changed its pricing.

Why this happens: Cloud services can charge for traffic you never asked for. Hard-to-guess resource names, usage alerts and spending limits stop someone else's mistake from landing on your bill.