[mike_d]

> Can't imagine a change like this would be made without some analysis.. would love an internal view into a decision like this

Sure, here you go: There was some buzz and negative press so it got picked up by the social media managers who forwarded it to executive escalations who loops in legal. Legal realizes that what they are doing is borderline fraud and sends it to the VP that oversees billing as a P0. It then gets handed down to a senior director who is responsible for fixing it within a week. Comms gets looped in to soft announce it.

At no point does anyone look at log data or give a shit about any instrumentation. It is a business decision to limit liability to a lawsuit or BCP investigation. As a publicly traded company it is also extremely risky for them to book revenue that comes from fraudulent billing.

[amzn-throw]

As someone that works at AWS (but not on S3), that's wrong in like eight different ways.

But the only way that matters is the core one - analysis, data, and instrumentation.

AWS does not make these kinds of decisions without a look at the metrics.

[mike_d]

As someone who has been involved in high level crisis management issues like this multiple times across various companies I can tell you that in a competent organization it looks nothing like your day-to-day decision making as an engineer or PM. Better yet, as few "rank and file" employees are involved as possible to avoid dangerous situations like you just described.

I don't want to debate the merits of what happened, but a prosecutor is going to open with "AWS billed people for things they never asked for or consented to." You're already fighting an uphill battle that it is not fraud.

Now what is going to save you is intent. If your defense is "yeah we identified the problem and corrected it" you're good to go. If on the other hand, someone decides to run a fucking metrics report of how much you could lose by stopping doing fraud and god forbid it is ever seen or mentioned in front of anyone in the decision making path - you now have to deal with mens rea.

If you have material knowledge that someone took "a look at the metrics", shoot me an email. I can help put you in touch with programs that offer financial rewards for whistleblowers.

[xmprt]

I find this hard to believe because this issue was known for years.

[drekipus]

It only just became viral in social media.

This is how I found out about it last week: https://youtu.be/OWggTcVgiNg?si=RnxDq1y6-yr_SQ8L