Amazon Web Services, a leader in the computing and cloud infrastructure world, reported an outage early Monday morning. This outage affected people and websites all across the world. One website in particular was affected was Canvas, the website where students go to do their work for every class.
With hundreds of websites out including an important one for school like Canvas, this means students are not able to check grades, complete assignments, and turn in their homework.
Jayden Pelphrey (10), along with a lot of other Wentzville School District students, are having trouble turning work in on time due to the outage.
“I think we should have extended time on our assignments because I have to do them all at home since Canvas isn’t working,” Pelphrey said.
Amazon Web Services is the backbone of hundreds and thousands of websites around the world. It takes a long time to create your own server for new websites, however, you can pay companies like Amazon to use their servers to run your website, which most businesses choose to do. This means that you are relying on their entire production. If the server goes down, then there’s nothing that you can do, because you are relying on Amazon to run your website.
Since so many businesses and websites rely on Amazon to run their internet for their websites, and still people are trying to use them, there have been a lot of reports of outages from hundreds and even thousands of companies from around the world.
Technology teacher Kurt Unger has received many questions about if he knows what is going on and when it’ll be fixed, but no one has an answer.
“I know that it has taken down Canvas, Class Link, Focus, and more,” Unger said. “I can see with this website called Down Detector, where you can see graphs of websites where people are reporting outages in certain things.”
Greg Lawrence, the director of technology for the district, sent an email to staff at 9:42 a.m. reporting that “we are aware of an ongoing Amazon Web Services (AWS) service disruption that is impacting sign-ins to multiple Wentzville School District digital resources, including Focus School Software, Canvas/Instructure, ClassLink, WeVideo, and Canva. Amazon has reported substantial improvements in one of the affected zones and is working to apply the fix across the remaining zones.”
Over the years, Amazon has experienced a lot of trouble with shutdowns due to human error and network problems, however, their most recent one was from a Domain Name System (DNS) failure. A DNS failure is when a system cannot translate a human-readable domain name like www.snapchat.com into its corresponding IP address.
Many teachers are also impacted by this outage not just because they can’t take attendance or can’t put in grades, but some of their people in their family can be affected too. Science teacher Debra Meuser has been affected in multiple ways since she needs Canvas as well as other websites to teach, but also it is impacting her son.
“My son works for a large business company and needs apps to do his job and if he can’t use those apps then it’ll be pretty hard to do his job,” Meuser said. “At the end of the day we’ll see how this affects the economy.”
This shutdown first occurred at around 2:11 a.m. CST and many sites have been not working, however, Amazon has started to see signs of recovery in some sites. This does not include Canvas and as of noon on Monday, the site is still down. Focus was recently rebooted and is up and working again.
Students with online work have not been able to complete their assignments due to Canvas and other sites being down. This is putting multiple teachers and students behind.
UPDATE:
As of 6:32 p.m., in an email from WSD director of technology Greg Lawrence, the district reports that “AWS is reporting near full recovery of all services.”
