Managing required restarts

Overview

When Ubuntu issues critical security patches, we update your servers immediately whenever we can. If doing so would disrupt your services, we need you to trigger the restart manually (so that we don't disrupt your application(s)).

If you'd like to understand more about why these restarts are required, please read our reference guide on the subject.

Restarting servers

Preparing to restart

Doing so after-hours is recommended to minimize disruption.

In order to minimize downtime, you can restart one server at a time if you have a load balancer in place, or you can use failover groups to achieve the same thing.

You can also use the maintenance page to temporarily notify your users that you are performing maintenance.

Restarting via SSH

To restart your server, it is recommended that you SSH to your server and run either of the following terminal commands:

sudo reboot 

sudo shutdown -r now