By Erin Moran

morane@findlay.edu

Students across the University of Findlay campus faced a disruptive shutdown on Monday morning when Canvas, the learning management system the University uses, was unresponsive for 12 hours.

All Canvas sites were down as part of a larger, nationwide outage affecting Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud hosting platform. The Economic Times estimated that every hour AWS was down, Amazon lost $72.8 million. 

“The majority of the internet runs on a service called Amazon Web Services, and that service went down for most of Monday when Canvas was shut down. And since Canvas runs on Amazon Web Services, Canvas by proxy went down,” said Chase Otto, a sophomore studying computer science and student worker for UF Information Technology Service (ITS). 

“It is one of those things where if it does go down, then there is not really much, if anything, we can do about it, and you kind of just have to deal with it,” he said.

The outage caused confusion for many students, leading ITS to send out a general announcement to students and professors around 9 a.m.

“Many people came up to me asking me about Canvas and if we were having issues,” said Otto. “We basically just told everyone that everyone is having this issue and there is nothing we can do about it.”

The outage caused professors and students to halt their work, as assignments could neither be posted nor submitted. 

Alex Mutchler, a graduate student, said the outage made it so he couldn’t do any of his coursework, since all of his work is online.

Despite the frustration, online learning remains an important tool in furthering education for many.

“There are very real benefits for online education that open doors for some folks that otherwise wouldn’t be open,” said Shawn Graves, associate professor of philosophy. “I have had a number of in-person, face-to-face students that say they find their schedules especially demanding with all the pressure that is put upon them from their extracurricular activities and work schedules.” 

“Having a rigid, set in-person classroom allotted time is just very difficult for them to maintain, so having the freedom of accessing an online course at their leisure is a great benefit to those students,” said Graves.

“Even if there’s a potential for outages, it is worth it to have online classes, as it is more accessible to people who can’t come in person, have full time jobs, or in a situation where they need online learning opportunities,” said Mutchler. 

While AWS fully returned around 6 p.m. on Monday, Canvas was restored at 8 p.m. ITS sent out a follow-up email explaining that they would continue to monitor the systems to ensure stability and communicate any additional outages.