We were financially ruined 😭

A few weeks ago I was driving my mother-in-law to the airport when the world came crashing down on me.

My wife and infant son were in the car, too.

Halfway to the airport, my son started bawling, so we pulled over into a carpark. While he had a feed, I made the mistake of checking my email.

There was an email from AWS (Amazon Web Services), which is the service I use to host this newsletter. It was from an automated system called Cost Anomaly Detection.

It told me I owed Amazon $70,000.

My heart went from zero to a quadrillion in an instant. I felt hot. I started sweating.

Seventy. Fucking. Thousand. Dollars.

I recently sent a newsletter update about waking in middle of the night to our house flooding a few months back. Because nothing like that had happened to us before, so I immediately thought of all the insurance horror stories I’d heard.

For the second time in the space of a few months, we were financially ruined. We’d come out the other side okay with the flooding; our insurance covered it.

I thought: but now we’re fucked.

There are horror stories about AWS charges like this, too. Because it happens. If someone hacks your account, or you screw something up, or some asshole decides to launch an attack called a Denial of Wallet (DoW) designed to financially exhaust you.

I’d thought I had things setup to avoid those risks, but there’s always that worm of doubt.

We saw my mother-in-law off while my heart sank into my shoes.

I could barely think. My wife took over the drive home. She said, “We’ll deal with it.” Much more level-headed than me.

We got home an hour later. I sprinted for my laptop. Logged on. Went to Billing.

My dashboard reported usage of $3.52.

I remember that figure, too.

Three dollars. Fifty-two cents.

There was an alert banner at the top of the Billing page. It said (paraphrasing): “Current billing figures may be wrong.”

That’s all.

It didn’t tell me which figure was wrong.

There’s a pretty dramatic fucking difference between $3.52 and $70,000.

So I checked Reddit.

There were a gazillion posts about it. Everyone was having the same issue. Some developers had been sent emails claiming they owed Amazon trillions of dollars.

If I’d gotten one of those I would’ve been suspicious. But $70k is in the realm of dire possibility.

It was a bug.

A bug that sent thousands of developers and companies billing alerts that indicated their businesses and lives were financially fucked.

There was no follow-up email from AWS.

No retraction.

“Hey, remember that email we sent you a few minutes ago? That was incorrect.”

Nope.

Nothing. Just a banner saying the figures were wrong.

AWS is the biggest cloud provider in the world by a long margin. Just like Amazon dominates online shopping, AWS dominates cloud services.

I recently read Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow.

You might have heard that word thrown around. Cory coined it.

Once a corp dominates a space and reaches saturation point, they begin the enshittification process.

First, they sucker everyone in by offering a free, useful service, and make it essential. But when user growth is no longer possible, how can they satisfy shareholders? They extract value in other ways.

Google deliberately made search worse to grow their advertising platform. Imagine it. Instead of serving the best result for your search query, they now serve the best result for their advertising buck.

Amazon have done it with online shopping, cloud services, and importantly, books.

Amazon dominate the book market with their Kindle offerings.

Publishers are forced to make worse and worse deals every few years with the tech giant. They’re being squeezed.

So far, Amazon has been pretty good to indie authors. They practically created the self-publishing marketplace, after all.

Yet, once traditional publishing has been squeezed dry, guess who they’ll come for next? It’s not if, it’s when.

And here’s the kicker. The link to Enshittification that I posted above?

It’s a Goodreads link. The ubiquitous book review platform that most book nerds will know.

Also owned by Amazon.

The engineer that caused the Billing bug probably feels like shit. I’m a software engineer too, and while I haven’t caused a bug quite that epic, I have created my fair share. Hell, I shipped a bad bug just last week.

The problem isn’t the bug itself. Bugs happen. The problem is how it was handled.

A simple follow-up email could have easily avoided a huge amount of stress for their users.

They didn’t do it, because they’re too big to care about the anguish they caused.

Amazon didn’t give a fuck.

But I sure did.

So the next time you’re buying a book, or an ebook reader, think about what it’s really going to cost.