"Broken pipe" error when trying to ssh into an EC2 instance

Sometimes you may see a broken pipe error when trying to ssh into an ec2 instance. It is possible that there is some form of resource starvation happening on that machine which is causing the SSH daemon from accepting new connections

$ ssh -i key.pem ec2-user@<ec2 instance ip> Write failed: Broken pipe
You can try either an instance reboot and if that doesn't work, you will have to detach the root volume from this instance and attach it to another healthy running instance to look at /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.