The AWS outage was a nightmare for college students

When abby fagerlein She tried to log into Canvas, a popular educational technology platform, to check her assignments on Monday morning, but she couldn’t get in.

That meant the 19-year-old college student, who is studying physics at Pasadena City College, was unable to access the materials she needed for her three classes, which were hosted or linked through a learning management system. After searching online, I realized that the Amazon Web Services outage that paralyzed much of the internet on Monday had also temporarily taken Canvas down.

Fagerlin also could not confirm whether she had missed a message from her professors, some of whom she said communicated exclusively with their students through a messaging system hosted on Canvas. Meanwhile, going to talk to one of her professors to request physicals from his class presented a separate challenge.

“His office hours are [posted] “On the canvas,” she said.

It wasn’t just Fagerlin’s problems. More than a dozen students at colleges and universities across the country told WIRED that the Canvas outage disrupted their schedules, preventing them not only from submitting and viewing assignments, but also from participating in class activities, contacting professors, and accessing textbooks and other materials they needed to study.

The hit to Amazon’s sprawling cloud computing services means sites and platforms such as WhatsApp, Venmo, ChatGPT, Roblox, Snapchat, Signal and even some British banks were no longer available to some users on Monday. The outage originated at an AWS hub in northern Virginia, named US-EAST-1. By Monday evening ET, Amazon said all AWS services had been restored.

But the disruption students are experiencing is a testament to just how popular Canvas has become on college campuses — and how increasingly focused modern educational life is on a few ed-tech platforms.

Canvas is one of the leading web-based learning management systems used by schools and universities across the country, competing with other platforms such as Blackboard and Moodle. According to numbers provided to WIRED by Brian Watkins, director of communications at Instructure, the company that owns Canvas, half of college and university students across the United States use Canvas, while 38 percent of K-12 students also use the program.

Watkins told WIRED in a statement that Instructure “admits[s] Canvas plays an essential role in the daily lives of teachers and students, serving as a central hub for teaching and learning, and we acknowledge the significant impact today’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage has had on that experience.