Students and faculty at Washington and Lee were unable to access Canvas and other sites powered by Amazon Web Services on Oct. 20 during the school day.
The university uses Canvas as their main educational resource to assign, submit and grade assignments. The outage caused disruptions to class commitments and other daily activities.
The Information Technology Services (ITS) Helpdesk started receiving complaints around 8:20 a.m., said Senior Academic Technologist Brandon Bucy.
“Shortly after getting to my office, tickets were getting assigned to me through our Helpdesk system,” said Bucy. “The issue appeared to be present in all kinds of different things, which was concerning.”
The ITS Helpdesk received reports of grading tools on Canvas working slowly, online files saying they had gone corrupt and students and faculty not being able to open Canvas at all.
After visiting the instructor status page, Bucy found that Amazon Web Services had an outage.
“At a certain point, we stopped counting tickets for it,” ITS Helpdesk and Shared Services Manager John White said. “Once we know the problem and that it’s off campus, our people can’t diagnose it anyways.”
For the remainder of the day, students and professors had to adapt to learning without using Canvas and other AWS tools, including Vista Higher Learning for languages.
“I had a biochem test the morning of the shutdown, so it wasn’t ideal that all of our practice questions were on Canvas and I couldn’t access them,” said Brenna Luczak, ’27. “It was kind of nice how our professor said it wasn’t our fault we couldn’t do the readings … it actually decreased my workload.”
Brody Sandifer-Williams,’28, said he had a similar experience.
“I had two exams that week and the study materials were off limits as a result,” Sandifer-Williams said. “Both of my professors were very accommodating, so it was only a minor inconvenience.”
Professors on campus had to adapt their assignments throughout the day.
“I was trying to get an exam ready and finished, and that was just gone,” said Jacob Gibson, a visiting professor of cognitive and behavioral science. “I had to rush and recreate the entire exam because postponing it just wasn’t really an option. The exam was fine. It just wasn’t as good as it could have been.”
Many professors used Outlook as a resource by emailing assignments and materials to their students or asking students to submit items through an email.
The outage affected more than just Canvas. Washington and Lee’s study abroad application portal was inaccessible. Applications for Spring Term Abroad 2026 were due Oct. 20 but were extended by a day to accommodate the software outage.
AWS resolved the issues by 6 p.m., according to an email sent by Instructure, Canvas’s provider, to instructors. AWS’s post-incident report said that there had been a Domain Name System (DNS) problem, where two different companies owned the same website URL but were competing to own the official website. The website switched between the two companies so frequently that it eventually led to all AWS sites crashing.
White said the outage revealed that there were more sites connected to AWS than he realized.
“I didn’t know up until Monday that Canvas services were actually based on Amazon services,” he said. “It’s like, who knew? And how many other services do I have that are all connected to Amazon?” Sandifer-Williams agreed.
“I don’t have any problems with Canvas specifically, but I think web services should be less reliant on AWS,” he said.
