A widespread outage left students and professors unable to access Canvas, the University’s primary academic platform, after a technical failure at Amazon Web Services on Monday.
The Oct. 20 AWS malfunction took over 16 hours to resolve, and affected the geographic region which hosts much of Canvas’ data infrastructure. The Daily Pennsylvanian spoke to members of the Penn community about how the outage disrupted exams and assignments, prompting frustration for students.
Many apps and company websites were disrupted by the AWS shutdown, including Snapchat, Zoom, Venmo, Starbucks, and United Airlines.
Canvas first reported issues at 3:04 a.m. EST. While a number of disrupted platforms — including Sidechat — came back online throughout the day, Canvas came back online for all users at 7:45 p.m.
For professors who planned to hold exams on Canvas during their Monday classes, many across the University were forced to postpone them until later in the week.
Nursing first year Nathan Jeanniton’s microbiology midterm was delayed by 20 minutes until it was eventually postponed to Wednesday.
“It's definitely frustrating,” Jeanniton said. “There's people that study for hours on hours, and even though we have additional days to study, it's just more draining to push back an exam.”
Wharton first year Nina Chen said the outage disrupted a scheduled exam during her 8:30 a.m. MATH 1070 recitation.
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“I was taking the gateway exam, and it took 10 minutes away from my timed quiz — but [Canvas] still was working,” Chen told the DP. “It was just really slow at that time.”
College first year Olivia Hodge added that the outage prevented her from submitting an assignment for her writing seminar.
“I couldn’t submit my white paper for peer review in my writing seminar ‘Video Games v. Feminist Difference,’ so honestly kind of glad about that,” Hodge said. “I’m in tech week right now for Glee [Club], and I didn’t want to do it.”
Hodge added that while the outage may have delayed classwork, it also gave students “one less thing” on their plate.
“Some people do need to finish their homework, but I’m pretty sure that professors will be understanding,” she said. “We were already behind in our class — we’re probably going to be even more behind now because we can’t access Canvas.”
For some students, Canvas was down as early as midnight on Sunday. College first year Sahasra Jonnalagadda said she was unable to complete work for her American politics and economics courses.
“One of the main issues was that we had a Canvas homework that was due at 11:59 on Sunday,” Jonnalagadda said about her ECON 0100 class. “I waited until the last minute to submit it, so it just became a problem because I then had to email it to the professor.”
Chen added that her writing seminar was also impacted later in the day when her professor could not access course materials and had to adjust lesson plans. Chen told the DP that she had “conflicting feelings” about the AWS outage, noting that despite the need to complete assignments, she now has a "valid reason to take a break."
“This is definitely a negative thing for me because I wanted to be productive today,” Jonnalagadda said. “But for people that had exams, it’s been positive — one of my roommates had a midterm today that got pushed back to Wednesday because Canvas wasn’t working.”
