“You will not see any March 2026 usage for the ME-CENTRAL-1 Region in your Cost and Usage Report or Cost Explorer once processing is complete,” the email reportedly continued.
Not just an invoice
While credits are sometimes applied to accounts related to service level agreements (SLAs) issues, waiving charges for an entire month appears to be unprecedented.
More contentiously, according to Quinn, the move would also have the effect of wiping essential Cost and Usage Report (CUR) data used in compliance and security forensics.
Quinn pointed out that the AWS CUR is not only a general billing facility; it gives customers a precise record of which services were consumed, essential for cost allocation. This also helps track wasted or under-used resources.
“For most organizations, the AWS bill isn’t just an invoice. It’s the canonical record of what infrastructure exists, where it’s running, and how long it’s been there,” Quinn wrote. Moreover, “compliance teams rely on it. Auditors request it. FinOps teams build their entire practice on it.”
In response to questions from CSO about this issue, Amazon clarified its statement, saying that usage data was filtered from billing reports so that customers would not see charges for the March period.
