A Canvas blackout hit campus early Monday morning as a result of an Amazon Web Services global outage, according to AWS. The outage left students and faculty unable to access course materials, assignments and announcement blasts published on the site.
The Canvas outage officially ended at 7:16 p.m. on Monday evening, according to the Instructure site.
Canvas, an online learning management system, is widely used across campus as a primary method for assessment and communication between faculty, teaching staff and students. AWS, a cloud hosting service, is responsible for storing information and managing IT services for various sites, including Canvas.
AWS experienced a global outage on Monday morning that affected a range of companies including Snapchat, Roblox, United Airlines and Starbucks, rendering some temporarily unusable. Some issues have been resolved since.
“We are continuing to work with AWS into Canvas, Mastery Connect and other Instructure products being down,” read an update on the outage on the Instructure site at 11:07 a.m. on Monday.
Monday’s AWS outage marked the “the first major internet disruption since last year's CrowdStrike malfunction,” which crashed millions of Microsoft Windows systems across campus and globally in July 2024, according to Reuters.
An error message reading “Canvas is experiencing issues due to an ongoing AWS incident” displayed across the screen when users attempted to access the Canvas website during the outage. The pop-up page recommended users follow the status of the blackout via the AWS site or the Instructure site.
Students took to Sidechat, a social media platform where students can anonymously interact in university-specific threads, to voice their frustration with the outage. Amid prelim season, students explained that the inaccessibility of course materials prevented their ability to effectively study.
“[I] never realized how much I relied on canvas until I lost it,” wrote one anonymous SideChat user whose post amassed almost 500 upvotes in two hours.
The University spokesperson could not provide information on the impact of the Canvas outage, but referred the community to look for updates on the AWS and Instructure sites.
Update: October 20, 7:55 p.m.: The article has been updated after the Canvas outage officially ended.
Varsha Bhargava is a member of the Class of 2027 in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. She is a news editor for the 143rd Editorial Board and can be reached at vbhargava@cornellsun.com.
