On Monday when students and teachers returned from fall break, they were met with an unforeseen obstacle: the inability to access Canvas. Due to an Amazon Web Service outage, Canvas became inaccessible to many teachers and students.
“It wasn’t necessarily Canvas that was shut down,” librarian Ashley Cousino said, “but it was an Amazon Website Service (AWS) that basically pushes out how websites connect to each other.”
The circumstances of students returning from break and reconnecting with the network for the first time resulted in the inaccessibility.
“It wasn’t down for everybody; a lot of students were still able to do their work [through Canvas],” Cousino said. “Unfortunately since it was the first day back from break, if [a student] hadn’t connected to the school’s services yet, they would have had that block to get to Clever or Canvas.”
Because many students couldn’t access Canvas, some teachers had to alter or completely change lesson plans, including business teacher Brad Robley.
“It was tough. Luckily for one of my classes I had one thing that was already planned for [the students] and today served as a catch up day,” Robley said. “For my fifth period Principles of Business class, I had a first period class too where I was able to print everything off knowing that everything could potentially shut down further.”
Because of teachers like Robley making adjustments, most students saw limited disruptions. That, however, was not the case for senior Jackson Carlton and other Global Campus students who heavily rely on Canvas for their coursework.
“I was originally planning on writing an essay along with a lot of my other work through Canvas, but that obviously changed,” Carlton said. “I had to pivot and focus solely on writing my essay. Unfortunately, because of the circumstances, I wasn’t able to do my Canvas work for other classes like Econ.”
Although the havoc of the mysterious failure of AWS networks was sudden, teachers and students adapted during this unusual return from fall break. And, as of 5:45 p.m., Canvas accessibility issues seem to have been resolved.
