Last night, DreamHost ran a standard billing cycle to clean up stragglers from 2007. Unfortunately, the biller was run for 2008 (December 31st, 2008 to be exact). This caused everyone to be billed as if today was 2008-12-31, wreaking havoc, including debiting huge amounts of money from people’s checking accounts, suspending accounts for non-payments and all the “worst possible scenario” situations you could possibly imagine.
We had a teensy eensy weensy little billing error last night… my first clue something was up when I saw this morning’s daily billing report (so far): $7,500,000.
It turns out due to my excessively fat fingers, nearly every one of our customers has been seriously over-billed in the last 12 hours.
…
The end to this story is that of course, I’m very very sorry, we’re very very sorry, and I’m sure you’re very very sorry this happened. I really am. I understand the sort of problems that an unexpected large charge to your credit card (or worse yet, your debit card) can cause. If the tone of this blog post seemed a little light, I apologize I don’t mean to offend and I realize how serious an issue this is. I’ve been up since 3:50am trying to undo the damage and maybe I’m a little shell-shocked.
…
We’re going through and fixing everything right now, but it may take several hours before all affected accounts are corrected. You will receive an email when yours is fixed, and if your credit card was charged, the charge will be refunded automatically.
Source: dreamhoststatus.com and blog.dreamhost.com
2 Comments at "DreamHost’s 7.5 Million Dollar Mistake"
[...] you have probably seen by now - since it appears the story is all over the internet right now - DreamHost accidently billed customers for totally over 7.5 million [...]
This is indeed a tragedy, this sort of large scale damage is the least of things that a web host would want to experience, it is going to take them quite a while to restore the damage, the confidence of the users.
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