People always suspected big tech was greedy, but not quite like this. Patrons of Amazon Web Services have been landed with panic-inducing monthly bills running as high as $1.5tn for subscriptions that usually cost less than the price of a cup of coffee.

From Bangalore to Bolsover, the bills have been causing alarm after a computer glitch resulted in the astronomical invoices being dispatched around the world by Jeff Bezos’s company, which provides data and cloud services to millions of customers, from students and small charities to big businesses.

“I almost had a heart attack when I received an email alert from Amazon Web Services with the billing for our charity’s school grounds audit app, which usually costs us less than a pound per month,” Dan Harvey, the head of marketing at the Hampshire-based Learning Through Landscapes told the Guardian. It was not even the end of the month and Harvey’s bill was standing at $7.8bn (£5.8bn), somewhat more than the previous month’s 43 cents.

In a dark way, this is the best possible kind of billing fuckup; unlike a 10x bump that would be noticed but not universally, this heads off into the land of the absurd.