Well done AWS for finding a way to make your technical debt cost other people money.

... only governments, yet this is Amazon

If it wasn't clear, my point is: Amazon is so big and dominant at this point that it's got government-like powers.

It wasn't clear, thanks

Completely agree. Having worked previously for ... (humans?) ... I can authoritatively theorize it would be fixed in a jiffy if it weren't making them bucketloads of money.

To make my case: just ponder the opposite: "What would an honest version of AWS do?". They would address the concerns publicly, document their progress towards fixing the issue, and even try to determine who was overcharged due to their faulty code, and offer them some compensation.

"We're too big to fix our own code" is, sadly, taken from the MS playbook (IIRC, something like that was made public after the breach of MS manager mailboxes after the whole Azure breach fiasco that was discovered by, IIRC, the DOJ that paid to have access to logs).

And yet somehow every time they launch a new product they have no problem adding it to their billing code.

I mean, adding some shotgun changes to a messy codebase is always significantly easier than refactoring the whole.

If there was a lawsuit, change in regulation, request from an enterprise customer, or doing so MADE THEM MORE MONEY it would be fixed in a week.