Canvas Shuts Down Among National Outages

Screenshot of Canvas, Emily Garver

Students are anxiously refreshing their browsers to access their course materials because Canvas has been down since early Monday morning.   

“That’s the most inconvenient time it could be down,” said senior Jenna Gilmore. 

Canvas is just one of dozens of companies who have faced shutdowns since Monday morning due to an ongoing incident with Amazon Web Services, a leading cloud service provider.

This poses obstacles for both Belmont students and professors who use Canvas to access and upload class assignments and materials.   

“AWS is currently experiencing an outage that is affecting several cloud-based systems, including Canvas. Canvas is actively working with AWS to restore services as quickly as possible,” said the Belmont Service Desk in an email sent out to students. 

The ongoing issue has affected big-name companies and websites such as Amazon, Snapchat, Ring, AT&T and Delta Airlines. 

While the takedown of Canvas may cause some inconvenience, Belmont professors are doing what they can to make sure their students are kept in the loop.  

“I think a lot of us are just double checking with students on email to make sure they can get access to the work they need to do,” said Terry Klefstad, music and graduate research professor. 

The latest update from status.instructure.com on Monday afternoon says the issue with Canvas is still being looked into. 

“It’s something that’s totally out of our control, so we need to... adapt the best we can, be understanding of students and the predicament that they’re in... and try to catch up as quickly as possible,” said Steve Berry, associate professor in the clinical mental health counseling program. 

While some company websites under the Amazon Web Services cloud have had some improvement, there have been no updates providing an estimated time that the shutdown of Canvas will be resolved. 

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This article was written by Gerogina America