Students at colleges and universities that use Instructure’s Canvas program were greeted with an error message early Monday morning when attempting to access the application.
The message later stated “Canvas is experiencing issues due to an ongoing AWS incident. We are working on recovering as soon as possible.”
Instructure’s Canvas utilizes the Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon that provides cloud computing and application programming interfaces to various applications and programs.
Over 5,000 people reported issues with Canvas within the last 24 hours, according to reporting from the Des Moines Register.
University System of New Hampshire’s Enterprise Technology & Services (ET&S) Assistant Vice President Teaching & Learning Technologies Alicia Medros sent an email to the campus community Monday afternoon about the outage.
“We understand the disruption this has caused to teaching and learning and other business processes and will work closely with our vendors in coming weeks on understanding what they are doing to be more resilient to future disruptions,” the email stated.
ET&S urged USNH campuses to look for status updates at https://status.usnh.edu/, adding that it would reach out when services are restored.
The outage has prevented students, faculty and staff from accessing any aspect of the program, including the functions relating to taking attendance, grading, viewing submissions or submitting assignments.
Other platforms that use AWS include the social media platforms Snapchat and Reddit, the telecommunications company Verizon and the delivery application Instacart.
The outage started in the early hours of Monday morning when AWS began reporting issues with its service and remains ongoing as of publication.
ET&S Teaching and Learning Technologies KSC Site Lead Elise Morrissette directed The Equinox to a statement from Alicia Medros, USNH ET&S Aassistant Vice President of Teaching and Learning Technologies Alicia Medros.
“We trust our partners are doing everything possible to restore service and understand the significant impact this has on student’s ability to complete their coursework today,” Medros stated.
As of around 7:30 p.m., Canvas was back online and was restored to full functionality.
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