Breaking News illustration. (Isabella Hammond/CU Independent)
Canvas is now functional for use after Amazon Web Services (AWS) errors rendered it inaccessible to students and faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder for the majority of Monday.
The fix was announced by Instructure, the owner of Canvas, at 5:16 p.m.
AWS hosts Canvas, meaning it stores all information regarding the teaching platform. Instructure released its first statement at 1:04 a.m., saying it was “currently investigating this issue.”
At 1:56 a.m., Instructure confirmed the issue was related to AWS errors. Between about 11 a.m. and 4 p.m., Instructure provided an additional, similar update.
“We are continuing to work with Amazon Web Services looking into our Canvas, Mastery Connect and other Instructure products being down,” the company said.
AWS released an update stating, “By 3:01 PM, all AWS services returned to normal operations. Some services such as AWS Config, Redshift, and Connect continue to have a backlog of messages that they will finish processing over the next few hours.”
Canvas was still inaccessible when the announcement was released. In its most recent update, Instructor said the platform is being monitored by engineers for stability.
The outage left CU students without access to course materials, preventing students from completing course assignments. The CU Office of Information Technology posted a message addressed to CU educators at 1:51 p.m., suggesting to extend assignment deadlines, waive late penalties as appropriate and communicate with students regarding the outage.
“We recognize the outage has a significant impact on teaching and learning on campus, and we apologize for the disruption,” the message read. “We are here to support you and your students in mitigating the impacts.”
Contact CU Independent News Editor Avery Clifton at Avery.Clifton@colorado.edu
