I'm building a hands-on portfolio project to move into Cloud and DevOps work. My account is about three or four months old, and I'm actively using ECS, S3, load balancing, Docker, Kubernetes, and an EC2 instance rather than leaving everything idle. I'm also using some of the available free credits.
However, whenever I try to create a CloudFront distribution, I receive this error: `Your account is currently blocked from creating CloudFront distributions. Please contact AWS Support.`
I've had an EC2 instance running and doing real work for more than two weeks, and I opened an account or billing support ticket, but it has remained unassigned for roughly three weeks. I understand that globally distributed services need abuse controls, but it's frustrating to be blocked from a free-tier-eligible service without any clear explanation or timely way to verify the account.
I've moved the CDN portion of the project to Cloudflare for now, but I'd like to know whether other newer accounts have encountered this restriction and what actually resolved it. Is paid support really necessary for a basic account review, or is there a better way to get the restriction removed?
5 Answers
CloudFront is useful experience, but it isn’t essential for demonstrating cloud or DevOps skills. You can still show infrastructure as code, containers, load balancing, object storage, deployment pipelines, monitoring, and security controls while using another CDN. Just document the architecture and explain why the CDN implementation was substituted.
The restriction isn’t universal for every new account. Some people have created a distribution with very little else in the account, so there may be additional risk signals or regional differences involved. The error message is fairly generic, though, and usually requires support to review the account before the block can be lifted.
Some users report that briefly running small instances in several regions and then trying again can establish more account activity, but that isn’t an official or guaranteed fix. Don’t leave resources running unnecessarily just to influence an automated check, since the costs can outweigh the benefit. Moving the CDN to Cloudflare is a reasonable temporary workaround while waiting for the account review.
This is probably an abuse-prevention check rather than a normal service-limit issue. CloudFront is globally distributed and can be attractive for automated abuse, so newer accounts with limited history may be blocked until they’re validated. Usage that feels substantial to you may still look very small from the provider’s perspective.
Make sure the ticket is categorized as an account or billing problem, not a technical service question. A technical ticket may sit because the issue concerns account verification rather than a configuration error. You can also follow up on the existing case instead of opening several duplicates.
You don’t normally need a paid support subscription just to use the service. Paid support mainly provides faster response times and broader assistance; it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that an account restriction will be removed. Three weeks without an assignment is unusually slow, so following up on the case or using the account-support path again would make more sense than treating the support plan as mandatory.
That explains the reason for the restriction better. I did file it under account and billing, so the lack of assignment is still the main frustration. I mainly wanted to understand whether the block was automatic or caused by something I configured incorrectly.