Why is my EC2 Windows instance down with a system status check failure or status check 0/2?

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My Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Windows instance went down suddenly and is no longer reachable. One or both system status checks failed. What happened and how can I fix this?

Short description

Amazon Web Services (AWS) monitors the health of each EC2 instance with two status checks. An EC2 instance becomes unreachable if a status check fails.

A system status check failure indicates a problem with the AWS systems that your instance runs on. When a problem with an underlying host impacts your production, you can stop and start your instance to migrate from the current underlying host.

Resolution

EC2 resources are Region-specific. Check the AWS Service Health Dashboard for service interruptions within the AWS Region where your instance is located. Look for outages and status updates to confirm if the problem is on the AWS side.

If there is no outage, then follow these steps:

Warning: Before you stop an instance, be aware of the following:

  • If you're not using an Elastic IP address, the public IP address is released when you stop the instance.
  • If this instance has an instance store volume, any data on the volume is lost when the instance is stopped.
  • If the instance shutdown behavior is set to Terminate, the instance terminates when it's stopped.
  • If the instance is part of an Auto Scaling group, first detach the instance from the Auto Scaling Group. After you stop and start the instance, attach the instance back to the Auto Scaling group.

For more information, see Stop and start your instance and How do I reboot an instance in an Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group?

1.    Stop the instance.

Note: If the instance becomes stuck in the stopping state, force the instance to stop using the Amazon EC2 console or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).This action can take up to 10 minutes. For more information, see Troubleshoot stopping your instance.

If you receive errors when running AWS CLI commands, make sure that you’re using the most recent version of the AWS CLI.

2.    Start the instance. In most cases, the instance starts on a new, healthy underlying host server.

Note: You can configure automatic recovery for EC2 Windows instances. For more information, see the following:

How can I set up a CloudWatch alarm to automatically recover my EC2 instance?


Related information

Troubleshoot an unreachable instance

Troubleshoot connecting to your Windows instance

Why is my EC2 Windows instance down with an instance status check failure?

Why is my EC2 Linux instance unreachable and failing one or both of its status checks?

AWS OFFICIAL
AWS OFFICIALUpdated 3 years ago