COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KOAA) — Canvas, a critical learning management system used by students to track grades, submit assignments, and download class documents, went down for over 12 hours on Monday due to an Amazon Web Services outage that affected more than 1,000 applications.
The outage began in the early morning hours and lasted until 5:30 p.m. Mountain Time, according to Instructure, the company that operates Canvas.
While the initial AWS disruption was brief, a backlog of requests kept Canvas offline for most of the day.
"I couldn't log in or anything. It was telling me like I had to like log out, and then I logged out, and it wouldn't let me find the school," one UCCS student said.
The widespread outage affected popular applications including Lyft, Netflix, Coinbase, Snapchat, and Spotify, all of which rely on Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure. Read more here.
For students, the timing couldn't have been worse. Some had exams scheduled that were disrupted by the outage, while others couldn't access lecture notes or complete assignments.
One professor dismissed class early after realizing students couldn't access required materials.
"We went 30 minutes into class, and when he realized that nobody could access the lecture notes, he was like, OK, well that's it for the day. See you guys later," a student recalled.
UCCS leadership acknowledged the disruption in a statement to News 5:
"These kinds of disruptions are difficult for students, faculty, and staff. We are grateful to our UCCS community for showing patience and for accommodating our students and colleagues who were impacted by the situation."
The outage highlights education's growing dependence on digital platforms. One student noted the challenge of completing basic tasks like reading assignments when they're hosted online.
"I had to finish an English reading, but the English reading was online, and I couldn't even do the simple task of just reading an assignment before my class this morning. So yeah, we have a lot of over-reliance," the student said.
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