In what appears to be a New Years glitch, Amazon has sent out a barrage of emails to AWS users that state recipient's free tier services are forecasted to breach free limits. These alerts are being sent to customers who have active services and even those who do not currently have any running services with Amazon, which is obviously causing some confusion.

These email alerts are being sent from AWS Budgets, an Amazon service that can be used to plan service costs, and state that customer's free tier services are forecasted to breach free limits. These emails have an subject of "Free Tier Limit Alert via AWS Budgets" and show a customer's current usage and their forecasted usage. In many cases, this erroneous forecasted usage is 30x what they are currently using.

What is even more confusing, is that people on Reddit and Twitter have reported that these emails are being to sent to those who do not even have any current services or for services that have been previously shut down.

And my first crap email of the year goes to AWS. I stood up an EC2 session while following @blackroomsec hack tutorial, I have it shut down because I had some issues and lol and behold my shut down instance is projected to grow to 70+GB. How many GB they waste sending these? pic.twitter.com/rHeW8hy79P — Richard Ahlquist (@rahlquist) January 1, 2018

Recipients have also reported that these emails are improperly forecasting Amazon Cloudwatch alarms as well. Amazon Cloudwatch currently offers 10 alarms for free and these AWS Budget emails are stating that the forecasted alarms will greatly exceed this amount.

I think that AWS glitched overnight. Got a "You're going to overshoot your free tier" warning email! pic.twitter.com/wsIOg2QXdb — IBBoard (@IBBoard) January 1, 2018

With the amount of reports regarding this email, though, it is safe to say that these were most likely sent out by mistake and can be ignored.

BleepingComputer has reached out to Amazon for comment, but at the time of publishing had not received a response. If we hear back from Amazon, we will update this article.

Update 1/2/18 10:58 AM EST:

BleepingComputer has received a response from Amazon that states:

You may have received a recent email communication from AWS, alerting you that your usage is projected to exceed the limits of your Free Tier offer. I'm sorry for any concern this communication may have caused, and I'm happy to provide some information on this.



This communication was sent by our automated system, and some customers received this notice in error. The usage forecasts present in that email are based on service usage for the December 2017 billing period and do not accurately reflect usage forecasts for January 2018.



If you would like to confirm your current AWS service usage, you can log into your account to review your services and make any necessary adjustments. You can find more information on the AWS Free Tier here:



https://aws.amazon.com/free/



Note also that if you closed your account you can disregard that notice as well.