EC2 charging issue

When you have an overdue payment that's been cleared, your EC2 instances may show as "running" in the AWS console but remain inaccessible. This is a known issue that can occur after account suspension due to payment problems.

Several factors may be causing this:

1. Account Recovery Delay: After clearing an overdue payment, AWS systems often need time to fully restore all services and access. This process isn't instantaneous.

2. Instance State vs. Accessibility: While your instances appear as "running," they might still be in a recovery state internally. Status checks may show as passed (indicating the instance hardware and basic networking are functioning), but not all services on the instance may be operational.

3. Service Restoration Issues: The SSH service might not have restarted properly, network configurations might need to reset, or security groups/network ACLs might need time to fully reactivate.

To resolve this issue, try these troubleshooting steps:

1. Perform a full stop and start (not just reboot) of your instances. This migrates them to new host hardware and might resolve underlying issues. Note that this will change the public IP if you're not using an Elastic IP.

2. Verify your security group settings to ensure they still allow inbound SSH traffic.

3. Check your network configuration, including route tables and internet gateway connections.

4. Try connecting using EC2 Instance Connect through the AWS Management Console as an alternative to traditional SSH.

5. Check system logs in the EC2 console for any error messages.

If these steps don't resolve the issue within 24 hours of your payment clearing, contact AWS Support directly as they can investigate account-specific issues affecting your instance accessibility.
Sources
Urgent: EC2 Instances Running but Inaccessible After Overdue Payment Cleared - AWS Account | AWS re:Post