Troubleshoot Amazon EC2 instance termination issues

Shutting down or deleting your instance is known as instance termination. The following information can help you troubleshoot issues when you terminate your instance.

You are not billed for any instance usage while an instance is not in the running state. In other words, when you terminate an instance, you stop incurring charges for that instance as soon as its state changes to shutting-down.

Instance terminates immediately

Several issues can cause your instance to terminate immediately on start-up. See Instance terminates immediately for more information.

Delayed instance termination

If your instance remains in the shutting-down state longer than a few minutes, it might be delayed due to shutdown scripts being run by the instance.

Another possible cause is a problem with the underlying host computer. If your instance remains in the shutting-down state for several hours, Amazon EC2 treats it as a stuck instance and forcibly terminates it.

If it appears that your instance is stuck terminating and it has been longer than several hours, post a request for help to AWS re:Post. To help expedite a resolution, include the instance ID and describe the steps that you've already taken. Alternatively, if you have a support plan, create a technical support case in the Support Center.

Terminated instance still displayed

After you terminate an instance, it remains visible for a short while before being deleted. The state shows as terminated. If the entry is not deleted after several hours, contact Support.

Error: The instance may not be terminated. Modify its 'disableApiTermination' instance attribute

If you try to terminate an instance and get the The instance instance_id may not be terminated. Modify its 'disableApiTermination' instance attribute error message, it indicates that the instance has been enabled for termination protection. Termination protection prevents the instance from being accidentally terminated. For more information, see Enable termination protection.

You must disable termination protection before you can terminate the instance.

To disable termination protection using the Amazon EC2 console, select the instance and then choose Actions, Instance Settings, Change Termination Protection.

To disable termination protection using the AWS CLI, use the following command.

aws ec2 modify-instance-attribute --instance-id instance_id --no-disable-api-termination

Instances automatically launched or terminated

Generally, the following behaviors mean that you've used Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, EC2 Fleet, or Spot Fleet to scale your computing resources automatically based on criteria that you've defined:

To stop automatic scaling, find the Auto Scaling group or the fleet that is launching the instances and either set its capacity to 0 or delete it.