The educational service, Canvas, in which the Snohomish School District uses for all online assignments was down yesterday due to an AWS shortage. AWS also known as Amazon Web Services is a subsidiary company of Amazon; AWS is the largest Cloud provider in the world owning almost a third of the computers/servers for the internet to run. Storing data, computing power, and IT services are its main functions. Canvas is not the only website that uses AWS to store its data, things like Snapchat, Roblox, and Fortnite are other big companies that use its services. Eric Benson is the AP Lang and Myth teacher here and is one of the many teachers that use Canvas every day, “My wife works for amazon so when AWS goes down that’s a big deal, it probably effected millions of people who work with Amazon, there’s video games that use that system, it’s shocking that we have so many eggs in one basket, if that one thing goes down, that’s like market stalls that echo out and domino over so many different things, I’ve taught enough that I can kind of improv a lesson but yesterday’s lessons were pretty set in stone anyway, but if it did require me to get to some files it would have definitely [effected], if I was a new teacher without a backup plan that would have been a rough day” Benson said.
Not only teachers were affected by the Canvas shutdown, students were another group unable to access assignments and reach lesson plans if absent, “it affected me because I couldn’t turn in my math assignments, I couldn’t turn in any of my homework, I couldn’t get stuff done before my big test this week and it was really hard to manage that,” Alyssa Box said.
On October 20, from about midnight through 2 a.m., AWS experienced increased errors in their systems and issued a statement at 12:51 a.m. on their Service Health platform, “We can confirm increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS Services in the US-EAST-1 Region,” AWS said. “This issue may also be affecting Case Creation through the AWS Support Center or the Support API. We are actively engaged and working to both mitigate the issue and understand root cause. We will provide an update in 45 minutes, or sooner if we have additional information to share.”
These updates continued each hour during the shutdown and were finalized with a summary of all the information after the shutdown had been resolved with a plan to publish a detailed description of the entire event. The outage was due to issues with the Domain Naming system, which is in charge of taking the links/names people are searching and rerouting them to a service like Canvas. “A DNS service such as Amazon Route 53 is a globally distributed service that translates human readable names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. The Internet’s DNS system works much like a phone book by managing the mapping between names and numbers” AWS said.