The cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, is used by many companies, including Snapchat, Canvas, Duolingo and Venmo, helping connect customers to their services.
On Monday morning, AWS experienced an outage that affected customers across the United States and around the world. Users received error codes as they sought to use programs and applications that have become part of their daily lives.
For students at the University of Florida and Santa Fe College, that meant Canvas, a learning management system where students access their coursework, was unavailable.
Anais Maldonado, a freshman at UF, had three assignments and a project to complete, as well as an exam on Thursday. Initially, Anais thought the outage meant she couldn’t submit assignments.
“I thought it was just, 'Oh, I can’t turn anything in,'” Maldonado said. Only later did she realize, “No, I can’t access it [Canvas] at all.”
Users trying to visit the University of Florida’s Canvas website were met with an error message that read, “Canvas is experiencing issues due to an ongoing Amazon Web Services incident.”
The UF IT Help Desk released a statement about the closure: “We are currently aware of connectivity issues affecting Canvas and related services. These disruptions are due to increased error rates and latency from Amazon Web Services (AWS), which powers many of our systems.”
While outages for many applications have been resolved, Canvas was unavailable well into Monday evening.
Some financial services, including Chime and Venmo, were also affected. According to downdetector.com, over 1,500 users across the United States reported Venmo outages in the early morning hours on Monday. Reports dwindled after 6 a.m. and spiked after 10 a.m. Over 8,000 people in the United States reported a Venmo outage at 11:19 a.m.
Gaming apps like Fortnite, Roblox and Clash Royale were also down for a time in north central Florida.
Amazon Web Services identified issues with increased error rates for multiple customers in the US-EAST-1 region. The servers for this region are housed in Northern Virginia. At around 3 a.m. Eastern time on Oct. 20, AWS noticed issues and began investigating the incident according to its health tracking website.
The company reported recovery across many sites around 6 a.m. but after 10 a.m. confirmed, “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region.”
The number of outage reports spiked around the same time and dwindled going into the afternoon as AWS fixed webpages.
As for Canvas, a site used by many schools and higher ed institutions, the application remained unavailable, leaving students with many questions into the evening.
“Especially because a lot of professors haven’t reached out yet, so I have no idea, like if stuff’s being moved back,” Maldonado said.
At 8:16 p.m. Monday evening, professors and faculty at UF received an email announcing that Canvas service had been restored, marking the end of a day that some have rated poorly.
“Negative 10 out of 10,” Maldonado said, “I need to get work done.”