The billing error briefly hit users of the cloud computing platform on Friday, with customers reporting estimated charges many orders of magnitude higher than their usual monthly costs.

Among those affected was a UK charity whose cloud bill typically comes to less than £1 a month but suddenly showed charges of around £5.8 billion. Elsewhere, one customer claimed to have received an estimated bill of $1.5 trillion, while another, who normally pays just $1.28 a month, was presented with a demand for almost $11 billion.

Social media quickly filled with alarmed reactions before AWS confirmed the figures were the result of a fault in its billing estimation system, The Guardian reports.

The company said it had identified an issue affecting estimated pricing calculations, apologised for the confusion and disabled the affected system while it recalculated customer bills.

Thankfully for customers, the only thing disappearing was their peace of mind – not their bank balances.