Amazon outage causes Canvas shutdown 

By Clarissa Biener and Diego Martinez

Additional reporting by Riley Maxwell, Matthew Espinal, Patrick LaBarbera

As the first week of midterms came to a close, Five Towns College students returned to school on Monday, October 20th, to find that a technical glitch had disrupted the college’s learning management system, Canvas. Amazon Web Services, or AWS, is responsible for the smooth operation of many popular online applications, and Canvas is just one of many platforms that went down.       

AWS began experiencing server outages in the early morning hours of October 20th, which caused technical issues for many major websites and applications worldwide. At 4:11 AM EST, the AWS Health Dashboard posted, “We are investigating increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” The outage, which originated in northern Virginia, inconvenienced Internet users everywhere. Specific major companies, applications, and websites affected include Adobe, Apple, Delta, Hulu, Lyft, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Reddit, Epic Games Store, Fortnite, Snapchat, Starbucks, and more.

“I went to Apple [earlier] today; I was going to trade in my cell phone, and I couldn’t because their whole system was shut down,” said FTC student Amanda Penny. “And I’m just sitting there thinking to myself, wow, wow, we really do rely on the Internet.” 

At 9:21 AM EST, the FTC community received an email from FTC Support informing them that, due to the AWS incident, Canvas would display an error message when attempting to use the site. Canvas, the FTC’s primary platform for online classroom resources, is an essential tool that enables professors to post lectures, assignments, and grades, and for students to complete their coursework. As midterms continue this week, Monday classes with online midterms were affected. “When I heard Canvas was down, I hoped it would be back by my 11:05 AM class, because I planned to give a midterm,” said Mass Communication Chair Holli Haerr. “Unfortunately, it was not back, so the midterm is delayed. It’s not a big deal overall to delay a test. But I really am surprised. I had no idea how many companies rely on Amazon for their websites.” 

Some classes had on-paper midterms, while others posted virtual assignments to be completed once the system was up and running. Most professors ran their classes without Canvas, changing their original plans for the day. However, with Canvas down, students were unable to access their class notes. “I still have to take a midterm,” said FTC student Mia Napoli. “So, if this [Canvas] is shut down, I can’t study for it.”

With Amazon providing updates every hour, there was a general expectation that the technical issues would be fixed relatively quickly. At 5:48 PM EST, AWS updated that a full recovery would be achieved in the next two hours. “I think Amazon should have resolved this by now because they are a multi-million-dollar corporation,” said FTC student Dominic Accardo. Canvas service was finally restored at approximately 7:00 PM.

The Canvas outage highlighted students’ reliance on the platform. “I have a few missing assignments that I need to get done, and so Canvas and Amazon being shut down is kind of preventing me from getting any of that done,” said FTC student Mia Napoli. “I need to get my grades up, and that being down is not helping.”  The outage created additional stress for life outside of the classroom. Greg Patane, who lost Snapchat access, added, “It was distressing. I have a lot of contacts on there that I don’t have outlets for, so if I lose those contacts there, I might lose connection.”