This is a developing story. Check back for more updates.
Canvas shut down early Monday morning due to an ongoing failure of Amazon Web Services. Piazza, a forum utilized for out of class questions between students and professors, was also out of service.
Course information is on Canvas for almost all classes at Tufts. It is often where students submit their assignments, complete online assessments and gain access to study materials. Currently it is unknown how the shutdown will affect classroom operations and for how long it will last.
The most recent update from the status website at 9:28 a.m. states: “We are currently waiting for full recovery due to an ongoing AWS incident.” At 8:50 a.m., it stated that Canvas was working on a fix.
According to Samantha Earp, vice president for information technology and chief information officer, Tufts Technology Services staff are monitoring AWS status updates and the software providers affected.
“TTS has been in touch with faculty about Piazza and Canvas, advising them of the AWS issues affecting those two systems,” Earp wrote in a statement to the Daily.
The AWS failure has affected the eastern region of the United States, based in North Virginia, according to the status website.
“We have narrowed down the source of the network connectivity issues that impacted AWS Services,” a recent update from AWS at 11:43 a.m. states. “The root cause is an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers. We are throttling requests for new EC2 instance launches to aid recovery and actively working on mitigations.”
At 12:13 p.m. AWS started to take “mitigation steps to aid the recovery of the underlying internal subsystem.” As of 1:03 p.m. they are waiting to take additional measures until they “have confidence [AWS] can do so safely.”
As of 3:00 p.m. on Monday the Piazza site is back up and running as normal.
Three hours later, around 6:30 p.m., the Canvas site returned online as well.
