An Amazon EC2 instance has become unresponsive, and the EC2 console shows that the instance is failing the system status checks. What is the administrator's first action to try to restore service?

When an EC2 instance fails system status checks, it indicates an issue with the underlying AWS infrastructure. Stopping and then starting the instance is the most effective first action because it migrates the instance to a new healthy physical host, which often resolves infrastructure-related problems. Rebooting the instance only restarts the operating system on the same potentially faulty host, making it less likely to fix system status check failures. Terminating and provisioning a new instance is a destructive action and should be a last resort, as it leads to data loss if not properly backed up and requires re-configuration. Inspecting CloudTrail logs is useful for identifying configuration changes, but it won't resolve an immediate system status check failure, which points to an infrastructure issue rather than a configuration error.