As many Bellevue College students have noticed, Canvas and other AWS services went down at 12 a.m. on Oct. 20. Many were concerned about submitting assignments on time, communicating with professors and studying for midterms.
Over 1 million reports were made by U.S users within the first two hours. The outage of applications like Amazon.com, YouTube, Snapchat, Netflix and many more had caused the company hundreds of billions of dollars, experts say.
Evelyn Gunn, a student at Bellevue College, commented on her inconvenience regarding the matter. “I got rather behind in my classes because Mondays are my day off and the one day I can work solely on homework, so having Canvas down was frustrating. My math teacher had to push back a due date on an assignment because of the shutdown as well. Additionally, my dad and I could not access our Venmo cards for online transactions.”
Some of the greatest worldwide issues caused by the internet outage included flight delays, online shopping, college students accessing assignments and employees accessing financial services.
Manuel, another Bellevue College student, mentioned the disappointing impact that the outage had on his online class. “I became a bit behind. I wasn’t able to have online class, and all my teacher’s notes were on Canvas. So, if my teacher wasn’t so dependent on Canvas, we would have had class,” he explained.
Amazon’s expert accounts explained that the outage likely occurred due to a complication with AWS’s domain name system. This is the internet area that converts domain names to IP addresses, numerical tags created to define internet sites. The interference caused a jam of server requests, as it was impossible to forward them.
Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of Catchpoint, an internet performance monitoring firm, claimed during a CNN interview that “The incident highlights the complexity and fragility of the internet, as well as how much every aspect of our work depends on the internet to work.”
The CEO goes on to say, “The financial impact of this outage will easily reach into the hundreds of billions due to loss in productivity for millions of workers that cannot do their job, plus business operations that are stopped or delayed — from airlines to factories.”
