AWS outages were a nightmare for college students
When Abby Fagerlin Tried to log into Canvas, a popular education technology platform, to check his homework Monday morning, but couldn’t log in.
That meant the 19-year-old college sophomore, who is studying physics at Pasadena City College, couldn’t access the materials he needed for his three classes, which were hosted on or linked through the learning management system. After searching online, he discovered that the Amazon Web Services outage that crippled much of the Internet on Monday had also temporarily taken down Canvas.
Fagerlin also couldn’t be sure if he missed any messages from his professors — some of them, he said, communicated with their students exclusively through a messaging system hosted on Canvas. Meanwhile, talking to one of his professors to request physical materials from his class created a separate challenge.
“It’s his office hours [posted] on canvas,” he said.
Fagerlin was not the only one who had problems. More than a dozen students at colleges and universities across the country told WIRED that the Canvas outage has left their apps out, preventing them from not only submitting and viewing assignments, but also from participating in class activities, contacting professors, and accessing textbooks and other materials they need to study.
The hit to Amazon’s massive cloud computing services meant sites and platforms such as WhatsApp, Venmo, ChatGPT, Roblox, Snapchat, Signal and even some UK banks were inaccessible to some users on Monday. The outage originated from AWS’s Northern Virginia hub, US-EAST-1. By Monday evening EST, Amazon said all AWS services had been restored.
But the student disruption is a testament to how popular Canvas is on college campuses—and how much of modern educational life is increasingly centered on a handful of educational technology platforms.
Canvas is one of the leading web-based learning management systems used by schools and universities across the country, competing with other platforms such as Blackboard and Moodle. Half of college and university students across the U.S. use Canvas, while 38 percent of K-12 students use the software, according to figures provided to WIRED by Brian Watkins, director of communications at Instructure, the company that owns Canvas.
Watkins told WIRED in a statement that Instructure “recognizes[s] The important role that Canvas plays in the daily lives of teachers and students is serving as a central hub for teaching and learning, and we acknowledge the significant impact that today’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage had on that experience.
