As Seattle Pacific University rolled into its fourth week of the quarter, students were shocked by an error message on Canvas. For many, the week marked when studies intensified and classes became more content-heavy. The recent Canvas shutdown caused students to lose access to study materials, leading professors to extend due dates on assignments or cancel them altogether.
On Monday, Oct. 20, students across the United States opened Canvas to find it nonoperational. At approximately 3 a.m. PST, Amazon Web Services, which Canvas relies on for operation, experienced a domain system name error. The outage lasted just over 12 hours, with operation being restored around 3 p.m. PST the same day.
When asked whether he had witnessed an outage like this in his eight years of teaching at Seattle Pacific, professor Peter Rivera, the chair and assistant professor of marriage and family therapy, remarked this was a first with Canvas shutting down. Rivera felt this shutdown was not very impactful on him as a professor.
“Yeah, I was just made aware of it this morning. I was going to change [the] due date on assignment and extend the due date for students. So that’s probably the biggest impact,” Rivera said.
Dorcas Kabaadi, a third-year psychology student, remarked that many classmates faced difficulties in studying due to the outage.
“I’ve heard a lot of my classmates say they had assignments they needed to turn in and they can’t turn it in, or they can’t access notes anywhere and they needed to study for their exam on Friday,” Kabaadi said.
Hikaru Kubota, a senior majoring in business and finance, commented on how she was not personally affected by the shutdown.
“It didn’t affect me that much, but I think for people who have morning classes, how it affects a lot because they don’t have access to homework,” Kubota said.
Eric Long, professor of biology and interim director of Blakely Island Field Station, explained that both students and professors have grown too reliant on Canvas.
“I think we all just have to be flexible. I think we start to take for granted the convenience of things like Canvas,” Long said.
