Canvas outage snarls classes on the first day back from fall break

Princeton students awoke Monday, the first day of classes after fall break, to an error message after attempting to open Canvas.

At 3:04 a.m. earlier that morning, Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, had reported in its service logs that Canvas was experiencing delays and outages due to an operational issue at Amazon Web Services (AWS). The outage from one of the Internet’s largest cloud computing providers also impacted services like Venmo and the McDonald’s app.

Canvas didn’t officially become accessible to students until 5:45 p.m., after most students had already experienced the brunt of the academic setbacks caused by the outage.

“I can’t do my homework, I can’t read the school materials that I have for school or understand what’s going on in lecture, and I can’t prepare for my midterm that’s later this week. So it’s very stressful, and I don’t really know how to prepare and make this day the most productive,” Tyler Douglas ’28 said.

Connor Romberg ’27 told The Daily Princetonian about the troubles in pacing for classes whose curriculum relies on resources and scheduling only available on Canvas, with this shutdown resulting in both homework and coursework setbacks.

“My professors, especially those of an older generation, are very concerned [about] what to do. They sent a lot of emails saying that this is [going to] affect us,” he said. “So it’s interesting to see how we’re tracking the delay of learning the [course] materials due to the shutdown.”

Romberg is a former assistant Prospect editor.

“I was trying to access course materials, like lecture notes,” Musse Woldu ’28 shared with the ‘Prince.’ “There are certain assignments that are due today that you have to complete on Canvas that you’re not able to do.”

“So that’s a little annoying, and there hasn’t been a lot of communication about what to do in the wake of that,” Woldu said, pointing to the absence of any student-facing statement from the University addressing the outage. Additionally, multiple faculty told the ‘Prince’ that they received no official communication from the University regarding the outage.

After the AWS outage was resolved, Instructure has not shared many further details regarding the potential causes of this shutdown or how they solved the outage beyond stating that “Canvas and MasteryConnect are now available for most users, and our engineers are monitoring for stability.”

Benedict Hooper is a News contributor for the ‘Prince.’ He is from Greenwich, Conn. and can be reached at bh3193@princeton.edu.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.