How do I delete unconfirmed subscriptions for removed topic?

The support person responded:

Kindly note that when deleting SNS Subscriptions, pending confirmations cannot be deleted. After 3 days, it is automatically deleted by the Amazon SNS team.

In other words, if something goes wrong with SNS service, the "undead" subscriptions will raise count of attempts (regardless of whether they actually call your URL or not), raising your invoice. If it's SNS issue, it will still be your problem. How extremely nice!

It's obviously and definitely wrong, there should be a means to remove runaway subscriptions immediately.

Have you tried deleting a subscription using this command:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/sns/unsubscribe.html

See also: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sns/latest/dg/sns-tutorial-delete-subscription-topic.html

It doesn't work.

The problem subscriptions are unconfirmed. As such, they have no valid ARNs: insetad of ARN, "PendingConfirmation" is displayed. If I try using "PendingCOnfirmation" in aws command call, error is returned:

"An error occurred (InvalidParameter) when calling the Unsubscribe operation: Invalid parameter: SubscriptionArn Reason: An ARN must have at least 6 elements, not 1"

Hence, AWS efficiently prevents me from removing the subscriptions (meanwhile, they are increasing calls count, and I can do absolutely nothing about that).

Hi @temmokan,

Apologies for the inconveniences. Are you currently still facing this issue?

We now have an updated AWS SNS blog that explains why by default orphaned subscriptions can't be deleted and possible resolution steps. The take away point from the above blog is that :

*If an Amazon SNS topic has subscriptions that are in the Deleted or Pending Confirmation status when you delete the topic, the subscriptions can't be removed from your account manually. You must wait three days for Amazon SNS to automatically remove the subscriptions from your account. *

• If after 3 days your orphaned subscription is not automatically detected please contact AWS Support so that the orphaned subscriptions can be deleted manually.

Should you have any follow-up questions related to this reported issue feel free to let us know by clicking the comment button.