On Monday, Oct. 20, at 3:04 a.m. Canvas, Quinnipiac University’s learning management system went down. It was restored around 7:00 p.m. later that day.
The outage was caused by an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. This outage also affected many other applications that use this system — such as social media apps, popular gaming apps, streaming services and online payment apps.
Issues with Canvas were first reported around noon, with the application displaying the following message: “Canvas is experiencing issues due to an ongoing AWS incident.”
Quinnipiac’s Information Technology Services sent out a statement to the student body at 2:03 p.m.
“As you are likely aware by now, Amazon Web Services (AWS), specifically in the US-East-1 region, is currently experiencing problems,” John H. Scott, executive director of technology infrastructure, wrote. “These problems are impacting multiple cloud-based applications and services that depend on AWS infrastructure, such as Canvas and Blackboard.”
The outage prevented students and professors from using Canvas, impacting their ability to access assignments, leading to frustrations.
“We had some assignments that were due, either today or yesterday, that were hard to access,” Norah Falcone, sophomore occupational therapy major said. “It was just inconvenient.”
Chiara Malta, a junior accounting major, echoed Falcone’s statement.
“I wasn’t able to do my work all day, which I had quite a few assignments due this weekend. So I was really stressed out on how it lasted throughout the whole day, up until nighttime,” Malta said.
The outage also disrupted students and professors schedules, with some having to cancel classes.
“It kind of paused my work for a couple of hours, or for the day, because I couldn’t do what I needed to do,” Tammy Pham, a first-year with a double major in computer science and game design said.
Nancy Burns, senior instructor in the biology department, agreed with Pham’s sentiments.
“It did prevent me from doing grading that I had set aside. I set time aside yesterday to do grading that was all in Canvas and I was not able to do that,” Burns said.
Justin Kile, professor of industrial engineering and program director for industrial engineering, experienced similar issues.
“I wasn’t able to build the course materials for my classes for this week, and I wasn’t able to do any grading yesterday,” Kile said.
