Troubleshoot issues connecting to your Amazon EC2 Windows instance

Verify that you're using the correct public DNS hostname. (In the Amazon EC2 console, select the instance and check Public DNS (IPv4) in the details pane.) If your instance is in a VPC and you do not see a public DNS name, you must enable DNS hostnames. For more information, see DNS attributes for your VPC in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

Verify that your instance has a public IPv4 address. If not, you can associate an Elastic IP address with your instance. For more information, see Elastic IP addresses.

To connect to your instance using an IPv6 address, check that your local computer has an IPv6 address and is configured to use IPv6. For more information, see Configure IPv6 on your instances in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

Verify that your security group has a rule that allows RDP access on port 3389.

If you copied the password but get the error Your credentials did not work, try typing them manually when prompted. It's possible that you missed a character or got an extra white space character when you copied the password.

Verify that the instance has passed status checks. For more information, see Status checks for Amazon EC2 instances and Troubleshoot Amazon EC2 Linux instances with failed status checks.

Verify that the route table for the subnet has a route that sends all traffic destined outside the VPC to the internet gateway for the VPC. For more information, see Creating a custom route table (Internet Gateways) in the Amazon VPC User Guide.

Verify that Windows Firewall, or other firewall software, is not blocking RDP traffic to the instance. We recommend that you disable Windows Firewall and control access to your instance using security group rules. Try one of the following options:

Verify that Network Level Authentication is disabled on instances that are not part of an Active Directory domain (use AWSSupport-TroubleshootRDP to disable NLA).

Verify that the Remote Desktop Service (TermService) Startup Type is Automatic and the service is started (use AWSSupport-TroubleshootRDP to enable and start the RDP service).

Verify that you are connecting to the correct Remote Desktop Protocol port, which by default is 3389 (use AWSSupport-TroubleshootRDP to read the current RDP port and change it back to 3389).

Verify that Remote Desktop connections are allowed on your instance (use AWSSupport-TroubleshootRDP to enable Remote Desktop connections).

Verify that the password has not expired. If the password has expired, you can reset it. For more information, see Reset the Windows administrator password for an Amazon EC2 Windows instance.

If you attempt to connect using a user that you created on the instance and receive the error The user cannot connect to the server due to insufficient access privileges, verify that you granted the user the right to log on locally. For more information, see Grant a Member the Right to Logon Locally.

If you attempt more than the maximum allowed concurrent RDP sessions, your session is terminated with the message Your Remote Desktop Services session has ended. Another user connected to the remote computer, so your connection was lost. By default, you are allowed two concurrent RDP sessions to your instance.

Check the console output for additional information. To get the console output for your instance using the Amazon EC2 console, select the instance, and then choose Actions, Monitor and troubleshoot, Get system log.

Verify that you are running the latest version of your RDP client.

Try the default settings for the RDP client.

If you are using Remote Desktop Connection, try starting it with the /admin option as follows.

mstsc /v:instance /admin

If the server is running a full-screen application, it might have stopped responding. Use Ctrl+Shift+Esc to start Windows Task Manager, and then close the application.

If the server is over-used, it might have stopped responding. To monitor the instance using the Amazon EC2 console, select the instance and then select the Monitoring tab. If you need to change the instance type to a larger size, see Amazon EC2 instance type changes.