Canvas, the platform Emory University uses to facilitate all of its classes, is experiencing a full outage since early this morning, according to its status website. Canvas reports that half of all North American higher education institutions use its services and are impacted by the outage.
Downdetector, a platform which tracks website outages, has been reporting around 5,000 complaints per hour with the service since the recent issues began. Typically, Downdetector receives about 5-10 complaints an hour about Canvas.
Instructure, the parent company that provides Canvas as a service, first reported issues around 3:04 a.m. EST, according to its status website. The company blamed the outage on a Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage, causing issues with the Canvas login service and submission system, which have left users unable to sign in to view courses or submit their work.
Canvas users at Emory are currently redirected to an error page, stating that Canvas is down due to an AWS incident.
AWS first reported issues around 3:14 a.m. EST, according to its status website. An initial fix was applied at 6:35 a.m. EST but later reports indicate another connectivity issue was reported around 10:14 a.m. EST. The outage has affected hundreds of websites and applications ranging from Snapchat to Starbucks’ mobile ordering.
The latest update, published at 12:13 p.m. EST, indicates that the error has been traced to the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, which provides cloud computing capacity, which companies use to store information and perform computing at scale.
“We have taken additional mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers and are now seeing connectivity and API recovery for AWS services,” the update reads. “We have also identified and are applying next steps to mitigate throttling of new EC2 instance launches. We will provide an update by 10:00 AM PDT.”
Canvas status can be checked here.
This article references an ongoing event, please check back here for updates.
Jack Rutherford (he/him) (27C) is a managing editor at The Emory Wheel. He is from Louisville, Ky., majoring in economics on the pre-law track. When not working for the Wheel, he can normally be found rowing with Emory Crew, where he serves as president, or at an Atlanta Opera performance. In his free time, Rutherford enjoys listening to music and walking in Lullwater.
