# Spot Instance interruption notices
A *Spot Instance interruption notice* is a warning that is issued two minutes before Amazon EC2 stops or terminates your Spot Instance. If you specify hibernation as the interruption behavior, you receive an interruption notice, but you do not receive a two-minute warning because the hibernation process begins immediately.
The best way for you to gracefully handle Spot Instance interruptions is to architect your application to be fault-tolerant. To accomplish this, you can take advantage of Spot Instance interruption notices. We recommend that you check for these interruption notices every 5 seconds.
The interruption notices are made available as an EventBridge event and as items in the [instance metadata](ec2-instance-metadata.md) on the Spot Instance. Interruption notices are emitted on a best effort basis.
## EC2 Spot Instance Interruption Warning event
When Amazon EC2 is going to interrupt your Spot Instance, it emits an event two minutes prior to the actual interruption (except for hibernation, which gets the interruption notice, but not two minutes in advance, because hibernation begins immediately). This event can be detected by Amazon EventBridge. For more information about EventBridge events, see the [Amazon EventBridge User Guide](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/eventbridge/latest/userguide/). For a detailed example that walks you through how to create and use event rules, see [Taking Advantage of Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Interruption Notices](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/taking-advantage-of-amazon-ec2-spot-instance-interruption-notices/).
The following is an example of the event for Spot Instance interruption. The possible values for `instance-action` are `hibernate`, `stop`, or `terminate`.
```
{
"version": "0",
"id": "12345678-1234-1234-1234-123456789012",
"detail-type": "EC2 Spot Instance Interruption Warning",
"source": "aws.ec2",
"account": "123456789012",
"time": "yyyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ssZ",
"region": "us-east-2",
"resources": ["arn:aws:ec2:us-east-2a:instance/i-1234567890abcdef0"],
"detail": {
"instance-id": "i-1234567890abcdef0",
"instance-action": "action"
}
}
```
**Note**
The ARN format of the Spot Instance interruption event is `arn:aws:ec2:availability-zone:instance/instance-id`. This format differs from the [EC2 resource ARN format](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/service-authorization/latest/reference/list_amazonec2.html#amazonec2-resources-for-iam-policies).
## instance-action
The `instance-action` item specifies the action and the approximate time, in UTC, when the action will occur.
If your Spot Instance is marked to be stopped or terminated by Amazon EC2, the `instance-action` item is present in your [instance metadata](ec2-instance-metadata.md). Otherwise, it is not present. You can retrieve the `instance-action` using Instance Metadata Service Version 2 (IMDSv2) as follows.
------
#### [ Linux ]
```
TOKEN=`curl -X PUT "http://169.254.169.254/latest/api/token" -H "X-aws-ec2-metadata-token-ttl-seconds: 21600"` \
&& curl -H "X-aws-ec2-metadata-token: $TOKEN" http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/spot/instance-action
```
------
#### [ Windows ]
```
[string]$token = Invoke-RestMethod `
-Headers @{"X-aws-ec2-metadata-token-ttl-seconds" = "21600"} `
-Method PUT -Uri http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/spot/instance-action
```
------
The following example output indicates the time at which this instance will be stopped.
```
{"action": "stop", "time": "2017-09-18T08:22:00Z"}
```
The following example output indicates the time at which this instance will be terminated.
```
{"action": "terminate", "time": "2017-09-18T08:22:00Z"}
```
If Amazon EC2 is not preparing to stop or terminate the instance, or if you terminated the instance yourself, `instance-action` is not present in the instance metadata and you receive an HTTP 404 error when you try to retrieve it.
## termination-time
The `termination-time` item specifies the approximate time in UTC when the instance will receive the shutdown signal.
**Note**
This item is maintained for backward compatibility; you should use `instance-action` instead.
If your Spot Instance is marked for termination by Amazon EC2 (either due to a Spot Instance interruption where the interruption behavior is set to `terminate`, or due to the cancellation of a persistent Spot Instance request), the `termination-time` item is present in your [instance metadata](ec2-instance-metadata.md). Otherwise, it is not present. You can retrieve the `termination-time` using IMDSv2 as follows.
------
#### [ Linux ]
```
TOKEN=`curl -X PUT "http://169.254.169.254/latest/api/token" -H "X-aws-ec2-metadata-token-ttl-seconds: 21600"`
if curl -H "X-aws-ec2-metadata-token: $TOKEN" -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/spot/termination-time | grep -q .*T.*Z; then echo termination_scheduled; fi
```
------
#### [ Windows ]
```
[string]$token = Invoke-RestMethod -Headers @{"X-aws-ec2-metadata-token-ttl-seconds" = "21600"} -Method PUT -Uri http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/spot/termination-time
```
------
The following is example output.
```
2015-01-05T18:02:00Z
```
If Amazon EC2 is not preparing to terminate the instance (either because there is no Spot Instance interruption or because your interruption behavior is set to `stop` or `hibernate`), or if you terminated the Spot Instance yourself, the `termination-time` item is either not present in the instance metadata (so you receive an HTTP 404 error) or contains a value that is not a time value.
If Amazon EC2 fails to terminate the instance, the request status is set to `fulfilled`. The `termination-time` value remains in the instance metadata with the original approximate time, which is now in the past.