What To Do If You Get “System Error 1” During AWS Phone Verification

Here’s a little tip for someone who encountered a strange error during AWS telephone verification…

Successfully get your account setup pin after receiving an error message.

Today, during a routine task we perform regularly – installing an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account on behalf of a client – we received an error message during the AWS signup process. While waiting for the telephone verification process to complete, up popped an error box containing the following text:

System Error 1

We are unable to process your phone verification request at this time please try again later.

Hello!? What is this? We thought. And, how do we overcome it. We tried again, same message? Tried using a different telephone number our office owns. Same message.

We then Googled the error message and found some advice which said to try the manual process, but as that’s not really a step we wanted to take straight away, and we’d never had a problem with phone verification before, we thought “let’s leave it a couple of minutes and try again”.

Lo and behold, the next time we tried this again using the original phone number we tried, things worked, we got the call, entered our pin, and continued with account setup.

So I’m posting this in case you run into this issue – try waiting 2-3 minutes and repeating. Don’t close anything. Don’t do anything. Try a cup of coffee (or tea) and then see if it is working. Chances are it will work – based on our experience.

Leave a comment below if you are experiencing this issue yourself and burn 60 seconds… Don’t forget to tell us (and the world) what your experience was (did waiting work?) in order to add to the knowledge out there.

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