The Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage occurred on Oct. 20 after suffering a rare outage bug and became a huge global issue with online applications everywhere shutting down and becoming unusable including Amazon and Snapchat; however, the application that affected students at Fresno State was Canvas.

Canvas is part of AWS Educate, which has the primary goal of accelerating the digital transformation of education through its easily accessible app and because of this, Canvas quickly became a main application used by many universities everywhere.

Through this application, students are able to turn in assignments with just a click of a button. Professors are able to post announcements, schedules, lectures and assignments through Canvas. Many schools rely on Canvas to get everything they need done. 

Fresno State is one of those schools that relies on Canvas. Canvas is an important tool used by both students and professors and once the outage occurred, they noticed it quickly. 

“I first realized about the outage when I woke up and scrolled on TikTok and then saw it for myself when I went to my class and tried to go on Canvas,” said Evyn Viveros a sixth-year student. “I was just trying to see what assignments I had due that day because I didn’t check the day before.”

With this outage, students also started to realize that not only could they not access their assignments, but they were unable to look at their agenda and upcoming events as well.

“I was doing work incredibly late at night when the servers went down so I had seen it happen firsthand,” said Adrian Corona, a freshman. “I knew we had an exam in one of my classes, but I was unable to double-check. I had some assignments due that day also, but my professors understood the submission was literally impossible so they simply extended the time.” 

Students struggled to work with the AWS outage because of how much they relied on having Canvas to get all of their work done. Professors also had to improvise around this event.

“I was grading and Canvas went down,” said Cheryl Gardner, professor of Media, Communications and Journalism. “At first, I thought it was my internet. The outage prevented me from grading assignments before the next class.” 

The AWS Outage created problems for everyone at Fresno State, which caused a lot of delay and pause on assignments. Without Canvas, the normal day at Fresno State changed drastically and caused everyone to think and work differently. The outage lasted 15 hours from just after midnight to around 3 p.m.