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I was unable to SSH or SFTP into my ubuntu server on EC2 this morning. It should be noted that SSH and SFTP were working fine up until now. To troubleshoot this I did the following:

  • Logged into AWS and went to my instance.
  • My instance said that it was running and passed all of its' checks.
  • I rebooted the instance from the AWS console, but SSH and SFTP were still not possible.
  • I selected "Stop" thinking that I could stop and then start the instance again.
  • At this point the instance went into the "Stopping" state, but never went to "Stopped".

My EC2 instance is now hung in the "Stopping" state. It's been hung in this state for over 90 minutes now.

How do I get my instance to exit the "Stopping" state, such that, it Stops?

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    I've generally been able to reattempt a stop and they offer a "force stop" if it's been stuck a while. Otherwise, contact AWS support.
    – ceejayoz
    Apr 18, 2014 at 16:07

2 Answers 2

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You need to hit stop a few times until forcibly stop becomes available. If it is still not stopped use the Amazon EC2 API, and do a force stop.

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Please, on behalf of all AWS users, contact AWS support and firmly complain. This is an AWS issue likely related to bugs or performance issues between AWS and Xen.

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    Computers of all sorts get stuck shutting down at times. It's hardly unique to AWS.
    – ceejayoz
    Apr 18, 2014 at 20:01
  • You're right, what's unique is that AWS' API doesn't handle that error set properly.
    – Britstacker
    Apr 18, 2014 at 20:55
  • How should it? People would flip on data security reasons if they could peek in on the instance, and some servers have extensive shutdown processes that could legitimately take a good number of minutes. How do you envision such a thing working?
    – ceejayoz
    Apr 18, 2014 at 21:18

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