Canvas was down at Skyline College and across the country due to an Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage today.
The outage started Sunday night, Oct. 19, and has extended into Monday. The outage has affected numerous social media platforms, video games and even banks such as Amazon, Snapchat and Fortnite, according to the New York Times.
For students across the country and at Skyline today, the outage notably resulted in Canvas being down for the school day. Skyline and other American colleges rely on Canvas as an application for students to do classwork and for faculty to organize their classes and take attendance.
Many students were surprised by the Canvas outage such as Skyline student Shahd Alghaithi.
“I checked [Canvas] this morning and I was checking for assignments, but it was shut down, and I was like what the hell?” Alghaithi said.
For other Skyline students such as Vicente Donaire, there was concern about whether he would be able to submit a major assignment on time due to the outage.
“I have to do slides, but the thing is, how am I supposed to turn it in if Canvas is shut down?” Donaire said.
For professors and staff, Canvas being shut down was a roadblock for getting through the day. However, Jarrod Feiner, associate professor of English said Canvas being down was not as big of a deal for him due to his lack of reliance on it.
“I use Canvas as a repository for essays, it’s where my paperwork is, so I can go paperless. I [use it for] attendance, but that’s it,” Feiner said “I’m not dependent on it. I know some of my colleagues are probably having a bad day over it, but for me it didn’t impact me at all.”
As of 4:15 p.m. PST, Canvas is currently back up and running.
