Azure Budget Alerts Go Berserk After Microsoft Account Migration Misfire

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Microsoft Azure customers have had a worrying few days after a problematic account migration caused forecast costs for the cloud service to skyrocket, triggering budget alerts.

An alarmed Register reader got in touch after receiving warnings from Azure's automated systems that they had significantly exceeded their budgets, and a glance at Microsoft's support forums indicates their issue was not isolated.

The problem was that costs had suddenly ramped up. One user, with a budget threshold of $85, received an automated alert indicating that their spend was forecast to reach $1,027. Another said: "We're actively seeing the same issue, costs have blown up by a crazy amount. No official notice or announcement from Microsoft either, it's appalling."

The cloud is a trap

[MpVpRb]

Run away!

Re:The cloud is a trap

[Z00L00K]

"The first fix is free" comes to mind.

If I buy a computer then I know the expenses and all that remains is cost of electricity and internet access.

Re:

[Senshi]

So it begins. We will be seeing aplenty more of this nusiance coming from big tech companies. They're pests like ants, once an ant appears, rest assurded more will come.

Re: The cloud is a trap

[simlox]

Especially Azure. You go to the cloud to get flexibility in the early startup days of a company and avoid having an IT department. But Azure is basically a cloud extension of the MS stronghold, i.e. it is something companies with an already existing MS focused IT department goes for. Or if you have MS centric developers. In my experience, Azure is primarily for .NET developers, other languages are secondary. The ARM templates are better than AWS cloudformation (it is newer), but their managed services are o

I bet it's got something to do with AI

[devslash0]

It's time someone's looked into the cost explorer and proved me right.

"We used Copilot to calculate these costs"

[david.emery]

That's as good an explanation as any, and since "hallucinations" in AI are acceptable to a lot of people on the AI Hype Bubble, it relieves Microsoft of the responsibility for this.

"problematic" = "MS messed up, again"

[gweihir]

And again and again and again. Why do these incompetents still have customers?

Re:

[StormReaver]

Why do these incompetents still have customers?

Because their customers are even more incompetent.

Re:

[gweihir]

It does very much look like that, yes.

Cost management and budgeting in Azure is a joke

[Murdoch5]

I'm honestly convinced you can't do any meaningful cost management or budgeting in Azure. I would love to be proven wrong, but I've been involved with having to crunch data about costs out of Azure, and it's always a head bang annoyance. It got to the point I gave up and wrote my own GO-based tool to grab the data I needed, correlate service data against their pricing APIs, and build custom output. If you rely on Azure / Microsoft to give you good feedback, you're just shooting yourself in the foot, and