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

Short description

A system status check failure indicates an issue with the AWS systems that your Amazon EC2 instance runs on. First, check the AWS Health Dashboard for service interruptions within the AWS Region where your instance is located.

If there are no outages, then there's an issue with the underlying host of the instance. To troubleshoot this issue, you must stop and then start the instance to migrate to a new underlying host.

Resolution

Check for service interruptions

Check Service health on the AWS Health Dashboard for service interruptions in the Region where your instance is located. Check for outages and status updates.

Configure your instance for a stop and start

Note: When you stop and start an instance, the instance's public IP address changes. It's a best practice to use an Elastic IP address to route external traffic to your instance instead of a public IP address. If you use Amazon Route 53, then you might need to update the Route 53 DNS records when the public IP address changes.

Before you stop and start your instance, take the following actions:

• If your instance uses an instance store, then save the volume data on the instance store to persistent storage. For example, you can save the data to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volumes or Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets.
  Important: Amazon EC2 deletes instance store data when you stop the instance.
• Create a snapshot of your Amazon EBS volume. If you experience issues, then you can use the snapshot to restore your instance.
• Temporarily remove the instance from its Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling group so that you don't accidentally terminate the instance when you stop it.
  Note: EC2 Auto Scaling might terminate stopped instances in an Auto Scaling group based on your scale-in protection settings. Instances that you launch with Amazon EMR, AWS CloudFormation, or AWS Elastic Beanstalk might be in an Auto Scaling group.
• Set the instance shutdown behavior to Stop to make sure that the instances don't terminate when you stop them.

Stop and start your instance

To migrate to a new underlying host, complete the following steps:

1. Stop the instance.
   Note: If the instance is stuck in the Stopping state, then force stop the instance. This action can take up to 10 minutes. For more information, see Troubleshoot Amazon EC2 instance stop issues.
2. Start the instance.

To automatically recover EC2 Windows instances that fail system status checks, set up Amazon CloudWatch alarms.

Related information

Troubleshoot an unreachable Amazon EC2 instance

Troubleshoot issues connecting to your Amazon EC2 Windows instance

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

How do I troubleshoot status check failures for my EC2 Linux instance?