Cloud service outage impacts online campus services

Members of the St. Joe’s community were unable to access key academic tools, including Canvas, Panopto and Qualtrics, following an Amazon Web Services outage Oct. 20, affecting companies and services around the world.

AWS is the world’s largest cloud services provider, which helps its clients access apps and services through a digital cloud. This allows clients to avoid housing the infrastructure themselves.

Robert McCunney, senior learning and experience designer in the Office of Information Technology, said OIT began experiencing difficulties accessing Canvas and other technologies before the workday began.

OIT sent an announcement informing the community of the outage at 10:47 a.m. While OIT did not send out a follow-up message announcing its restoration, some users noticed Canvas had returned when AWS programs were restored at 6:01 p.m.

Veronica Hardy, Ph.D., adjunct professor of educational leadership and counseling, was teaching an asynchronous course when the AWS outage nullified Canvas. Hardy said several of their students emailed to let them know they were having technology troubles. Though Hardy’s students had submitted their assignments the previous day, Hardy said the outage prevented their students from accessing future modules.

“It slowed down my opportunity to grade and respond to their assignments because I missed the whole day of being able to provide those responses,” Hardy said.

Evan Mullen ’17, MBA ’27, a graduate student and graduate assistant, said his classes began the same day as the Canvas outage. Mullen said the outage made preparation for class more difficult, as he could not access the syllabus or the Zoom meeting for class. Mullen said his professor had to create a new Zoom link for the class. 

“It literally affected every aspect of all my academics that week, in that day,” Mullen said.

McCunney said the outage was frustrating partially because OIT could do little to address it.

“There’s only so much we can do to get it back up,” McCunney said. “We’re reliant on these other institutions.”