On Monday, Oct. 20, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage that affected several services, including Canvas. The outage lasted from 10:00 a.m. to 6 p.m., involving teachers and students.
According to the Associate Director of the Service Center, Krew Tran, the outage was caused by an issue with Amazon’s Domain Name System (DNS). “With large-scale cloud services like AWS, even a small change or error can create ripple effects and lead to widespread outages like the one we experienced,” Tran said.
The Service Center detected the issue early that morning after staff members, including student workers, were unable to log into Canvas. “We confirmed the outage within minutes and noticed that Canvas had already posted a link to AWS’s status page, showing they were aware of the issue and working to resolve it,” Tran said.
Unfortunately, the Service Center could not resolve the issue due to it being related directly to Amazon; however, they kept track of the updates and informed students and faculty. “We were able to monitor the issue by viewing the Amazon Web Services status page and sent an email out as soon as we noticed Canvas was down and sent another when Canvas was restored,” Tran said.
The outage extended beyond Canvas. Other web services owned by Amazon, including Prime Video, Alexa and Ring Camera system, were also affected, along with major platforms such as Snapchat, Reddit, Slack and several banking and gaming services.
Faculty members were able to quickly adapt to the disruption. Professor Brad Johnson highlighted that while the outage didn’t severely affect his class, it showed how the size of major corporations can lead to widespread disruptions like these. “The crash wasn’t terribly disruptive to our class because we only had some readings that we were able to find elsewhere online,” Johnson said. “I was shocked at how many services and organizations come under the umbrella of Amazon. When a company’s failure can cause catastrophic problems for society, that company is probably too large.”
Although the outage lasted a few hours, it caused some confusion across campus. Once Canvas was restored, everything was back to normal, but it was a reminder of how much we rely on technology and how fast things can stop working.
