AWS Outage Disrupted College Students’ Education
▼ Summary
– Abby Fagerlin, a college student, couldn’t access Canvas due to an outage, preventing her from checking assignments and communicating with professors.
– The Canvas outage was part of a larger Amazon Web Services disruption that affected many popular sites and services like WhatsApp and Venmo.
– Students nationwide reported the outage disrupted their schedules by blocking access to assignments, class activities, and study materials.
– Canvas is widely used, with half of US college students and 38% of K-12 students relying on the platform for their education.
– The incident highlights how dependent modern education has become on a few key educational technology platforms like Canvas.
When a major Amazon Web Services outage struck on Monday, it didn’t just disrupt popular apps and websites, it directly impacted the education of countless college students nationwide. The widespread technical failure highlighted just how deeply cloud computing services have become embedded in academic life, with learning management systems like Canvas becoming essential hubs for coursework, communication, and classroom resources.
Abby Fagerlin, a 19-year-old physics student at Pasadena City College, discovered the problem firsthand when she tried logging into Canvas to review her assignments. Unable to access the platform, she found herself cut off from materials for all three of her classes. She also worried about missing messages from professors who rely exclusively on Canvas for student communication. Even seeking help in person presented a challenge, since her professor’s office hours were listed only on the inaccessible site.
Fagerlin was far from alone. More than a dozen students from various colleges reported that the Canvas outage disrupted their entire academic schedule. They couldn’t submit assignments, view class materials, participate in online activities, or reach instructors. Some even lost access to digital textbooks and other study resources hosted on the platform.
The outage originated from AWS’s US-EAST-1 data center in northern Virginia, affecting a broad range of online services including WhatsApp, Venmo, ChatGPT, and several UK banking platforms. Though Amazon confirmed that services were restored by Monday evening, the incident underscored the vulnerability of institutions that depend heavily on centralized digital tools.
Canvas is among the most widely adopted learning management systems in the United States, competing with platforms such as Blackboard and Moodle. According to Brian Watkins, communications director at Instructure, the company behind Canvas, roughly half of all U.S. college students and 38 percent of K-12 students rely on the software. In a statement, Watkins acknowledged the platform’s integral role in education and recognized the significant disruption caused by the AWS outage.
This incident serves as a stark reminder of how much modern education revolves around a small number of technology platforms. When one critical service fails, the ripple effects can stall academic progress and expose the fragility of our increasingly digital learning environments.
(Source: Wired)
