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Amazon ECS increases container exit reason message to 1024 characters

Posted on: Jun 11, 2025

Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) has extended the length of the container exit reason message from 255 to 1024 characters. The enhancement helps you debug more effectively by providing more complete error messages when containers fail.

Amazon ECS customers use container exit reason messages to troubleshoot their running or stopped tasks. Error messages can be accessed through the “reason” field in the DescribeTasks API response, which is a short, human-readable string that provides details about a running or stopped container. Previously, error messages beyond 255 characters were truncated. With the increased limit to 1024 characters, customers can now surface and view richer error details, making troubleshooting faster.

Customers can access longer container exit reason messages through the Amazon Web Services Management Console and the DescribeTasks API. This improvement is available in all the Amazon Web Services regions, including the Amazon Web Services China (Beijing) Region, operated by Sinnet and the Amazon Web Services China (Ningxia) Region, operated by NWCD. Longer exit error messages are applied to tasks deployed on Fargate Platform 1.4.0 or container instances with ECS Agent v1.92.0 or later. To learn more, refer to the documentation.