There was this awesome bug with AWS a while back too where you could accidentally sign up an account twice with the same email address, but no way of knowing you had two accounts without paying really close attention to your account ID. So if you went to log in and used your email and one password, you would sign into one account, but if you used the same email and a different password, you would sign into the second account (who knows what would happen if both accounts had the same password). Anyways a couple years ago I signed up for an AWS account to mess around with the free tier (doing a pluralsight course I think), and after a bunch of messing around didn't touch it again for a while. A year after I was going to use AWS for something and forgot I had already setup an account earlier (or thought it was on a different email or whatever), and managed to sign up for a second account with the same email address (which now became the primary account). Continue down a few months and I start getting billing emails for a few dollars a month but could not figure out why (and the invoice wouldn't show up in my AWS console for that email address). After digging I realized somehow I had two AWS accounts one the same email and the bill was on the other one, but I couldn't log into it as I didn't remember the password, and doing the password reset would just sent me a reset for the second account. It took a tonne of back and forth emails with amazon support to get it fixed and gain access to both accounts, the charges ended up being for having a few VMs created (but stopped) and my free tier ran out so it was billing me a few dollars for storage a month. I haven't really touched AWS since after that because the billing can be so obtuse if you aren't paying very very close attention.
> There was this awesome bug with AWS a while back too where you could accidentally sign up an account twice
Not a bug, this has been amazon's philosophy with accounts on all systems from very early on. Some of the initial designers of amazon knew families where multiple people shared one e-mail address, but wanted separate accounts for shopping.
Multiple accounts per e-mail address was a concious design decision for all Amazon systems.
There was no way at the time for me to a) see that I had a second account associated with my email address or b) reset the password for the second account without going through support c) merging the two accounts into one even with supports help.
Indeed. Multiple accounts per email is the most legacy of legacy features, and it's actually pretty easy to not realize it exists even if you work for Amazon. I'm not surprised internal systems don't handle it well. If I recall right, there was a push to get customers to move off it, using site messaging etc, because it was such a pain to maintain.
I have that problem at my current job. The average user is probably 60. Our policy is to tell people that email accounts are free. Our primary concern is that people would recover the password to someone else's account and access data that we only let the other person access.
