Unable to run and preview a query on Athena. Received an error.

To start troubleshooting, you could check out the instructions in this link - https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/athena-hive-cursor-error/

Typically the HIVE_CURSOR_ERROR has to do with the fact that the underlying data does not match the table definition, was a malformed JSON, etc. One thing that would help is to use "S3 Select" to view the files to ensure the data is in the format you expect it to be in. I expect the root cause to be possibly one of the following:

• Corrupted CSV files or malformed JSON
• Parquet or ORC files with incompatible data types
• Corrupted Compression
• Empty Files
• Athena is unable to decrypt the data (probably key used for encryption being deleted)

Given that your Error message is: HIVE_CURSOR_ERROR: Unable to communicate with downstream services It may be related to not able to reach the data in S3, so check if encryption/decryption works and Athena has the right access to read the data.