Canvas is currently experiencing an outage due to a technical failure within Amazon Web Services.
Canvas is a learning management system that allows students and educators to complete coursework, submit assignments and receive grades remotely. The system has been used by Cal State Fullerton since 2020.
An email was sent at 8:15 a.m. from Information Technology Communications alerting campus to the outage.
“Our team is aware of the issue and actively working with the vendor to restore access as quickly as possible,” Associate Vice President for Academic Technology Services Willie Peng wrote in the email.
Students on the CSUF Reddit page reported difficulties logging in to and submitting assignments on Canvas as early as midnight Monday.
As of around 1 p.m. Monday, the Canvas site reads “​​Canvas is experiencing issues due to an ongoing AWS incident. We are working on recovering as soon as possible.”
AWS is a cloud-based service that allows businesses and users to store data in the cloud, instead of locally, allowing them to run their services from anywhere in the world.
The AWS incident has impacted several major sites and apps, including Snapchat, Fortnite, Delta Airlines and Coinbase.
Several recent incidents have continued to surface as cloud-based services become more widely relied on.
In 2024, a faulty update pushed by cloud-based cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed nearly 8.5 million Microsoft devices, leading to the global shutdown of airports, banks and hospitals.
It is currently unclear how the AWS outage will affect class cancellations and assignment submissions, or how long the outage may last.
This story will be updated.