When students and teachers arrived at school on Monday morning, they were met with Canvas by Instructure being down for maintenance. This outage wasn’t just affecting West High, but also the University of Iowa and other schools across the nation. Over 135,000 reports had been issued related to Canvas on Monday, according to Downdetector.

The issues with Canvas were part of a national cloud service outage due to an Amazon Web Services incident. AWS is a global cloud infrastructure “with industry-leading security, reliability and performance” owned and operated by Amazon. While some platforms hosted by AWS are professional and education-focused, people might have also been affected by this outage while trying to use Snapchat, play Wordle or complete their streaks on Duolingo. 

Canvas appeared to be one of the hardest hit sites, but Downdetector reported that other sites were also affected by the outage. A few are as follows:

• Adobe Creative Cloud
• Amazon
• Apple Music
• CollegeBoard
• Doordash
• Duolingo
• Hulu
• Life360
• Microsoft
• The New York Times
• Roblox
• Starbucks
• Snapchat
• Venmo

AWS was having problems in its US-East-1 region, with the first reports of an issue starting Oct. 20, 12:11 a.m. PDT, according to AWS service health. The US-East-1 region is based in northern Virginia and is one of nine AWS geographic regions in North America. The report at 2:01 a.m. PDT identified that the issue seemed to be related to “DNS resolution,” and, at 3:53 p.m. PDT, a statement released on AWS service health said that the issue had been fully resolved. By 4:15 p.m. PDT, Canvas was back up and running, allowing students to turn in assignments, see other classroom materials and access notes.