Students across the University of Southern Mississippi campus woke up Oct. 20 to find their Canvas app down due to an Amazon Web Services outage.
At around 12:11 a.m., AWS experienced a disruption that affected more than 2,000 services across 60 countries. Major apps including Reddit, Snapchat and Roblox were also down that day.
Jeremy Duckworth, an instructor in the Computer Science and Computer Engineering Department, said the issue was related to the Domain Name System.
“It started misbehaving due to race conditions, which is a particular computer software issue affecting some domains,” Duckworth said. “Basically, a few processes that worked together to update those services got out of sync.”
The disruption had widespread effects. According to CNN, people were unable to order food, communicate with hospital networks, access mobile banking, or connect with security systems and smart home devices.
In Hattiesburg, students experienced the outage firsthand. Junior Jordan Gibson discovered Canvas was down while at his advisement appointment. He was trying to register for classes and show his current schedule to his advisor, but the app would not load.
“I didn’t know if my stuff was messing up or if Canvas was down, and it was just really weird. Then hours later, I realized, ‘Oh, it’s just for everything now,’” Gibson said. “I got kind of annoyed because I had four assignments due this week that I planned to do that day, so I just had to do them another time.”
Canvas was restored later that day around 8 p.m., allowing Gibson to begin his assignments. Several professors granted extensions due to the outage.
Amazon apologized to customers for the disruption and said it is reviewing the incident to prevent similar events in the future.
