You're right, I was getting two relatively recent posts mixed up:
1. After a DDoS attack, someone got a $100k bill from Netlify for his static site and after he asked to have it waived, they generously reduced it to $5k. Only after his posts about it blew up did Netlify waive it completely. [1]
2. Someone got a $1k bill from AWS because lots of people made _unauthorized_ requests against his empty S3 bucket. AWS did agree to waive it immediately, prior to any social media posts. [2]
I probably just remembered (2) as "that ridiculous billing situation involving AWS" but got the details of what exactly happened mixed up with (1).
1. After a DDoS attack, someone got a $100k bill from Netlify for his static site and after he asked to have it waived, they generously reduced it to $5k. Only after his posts about it blew up did Netlify waive it completely. [1]
2. Someone got a $1k bill from AWS because lots of people made _unauthorized_ requests against his empty S3 bucket. AWS did agree to waive it immediately, prior to any social media posts. [2]
I probably just remembered (2) as "that ridiculous billing situation involving AWS" but got the details of what exactly happened mixed up with (1).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39520776
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40203126