Lightsail instance randomly shut down at exactly 11pm

Question

Hello!

I have a Lightsail instance that I've been running for about a year now without any issues. Last night at exactly 11pm (the timestamp is 4:00:11 UTC) the server randomly shut down. I checked the syslog and it appears to have been shutdown rather than crashed. I checked the system metrics and everything seems normal there (CPU was hovering around 3% usage, no status check failures). I don't have any cronjobs or backups that run at that time, so I'm sort of at a loss currently. Is it possible that AWS ran some sort of scheduled task that accidentally shut the server down?

Answer

Hello

Warm greetings from AWS!

To Investigate the issue, we require details that are non-public information i.e details that are specific to your AWS account. First of all, I would suggest you to check cloudtrail for any stop/reboot events performed on the instance[1]. Please follow the below steps:
1. Open Cloudtrail console from AWS Management Console
2. Select Event history from the left panel.
3. In the Lookup attributes select Event Source from dropdown and select “lightsail.amazonaws.com” as event source.
4. Set the time frame around the time when you observed the issue. 
5. Search for “StopInstance” or “RebootInstance” call
6. If the shutdown was performed explicitly, you will be able to find the username who stopped/rebooted the instance. Any information regarding the shutdown would be mentioned in the logs.

In case the shutdown occurred due to hardware failure, it will not be recorded in the cloudtrail. In such case, the best approach here would be to open a case with AWS Support[2] along with the resource details in order to investigate the issue better.

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awscloudtrail/latest/userguide/view-cloudtrail-events-console.html#viewing-details-for-an-event  
[2] https://console.aws.amazon.com/support/home#/case/create

Lightsail instance randomly shut down at exactly 11pm

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