Students and professors faced disruptions Monday after Canvas, a learning management system used by UC Berkeley,\u00a0went offline for about 16 hours\u00a0due to a nationwide outage of Amazon Web Services, or AWS, which hosts the system.<\/p>\n
The outage started at midnight on Monday. By late afternoon the same day, most services \u2014 including Canvas, also known on campus as bCourses \u2014 were back online, according to campus spokesperson Kyle Gibson in an email. Aside from Canvas, other services such as BearBuy and Grubhub, used by Berkeley Dining for mobile ordering, were also impacted.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny service that relies on AWS could have been affected,\u201d Gibson said in the email. \u201cMost campus IT systems and websites were not affected, as shown on the Berkeley IT System Status Dashboard. \u2026 Additionally, faculty, staff and students may use other programs or services hosted on AWS that they individually subscribe to; these are not centrally managed by UC Berkeley IT, so the campus cannot assess the full scope of the impact of the AWS outage.\u201d<\/p>\n
Due to the widespread use of Canvas on campus, the outage impacted teaching and learning. Specifically, many students were unable to access assignments, lecture notes, homework and test materials that were posted on Canvas.<\/p>\n
Despite the challenges posed by the outage, some professors adapted quickly. The Chemistry 1A professors and graduate student instructors, or GSIs, who had held a midterm the night of the outage, quickly transferred the course materials to Ed Discussion, a platform that the class already uses, according to GSI Ry Papadopoulos.<\/p>\n
Since students were able to access most class materials on Ed Discussion, there were no conversations about postponing the midterm, according to Papadopoulos.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cHonestly, the (chemistry) GSIs for 1A (are) such a well-oiled machine. Things were moved before I even realized there was a shutdown,\u201d Papadopoulos said. \u201cI had 8 a.m. office hours and I was trying to pull up a lecture slide to show someone, and that\u2019s when I realized that Canvas was down, and people were already on Ed Discussion trying to post information.\u201d<\/p>\n
Additionally, political science professor Michaela Mattes granted a student an extension for an assignment due the day of the outage since they were unable to access the necessary readings. She added that she also sent lecture slides and class readings to students in her lecture course through email.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Berkeley IT closely monitored the outage and coordinated with Canvas and AWS, and that the issue went far beyond just UC Berkeley, Gibson said in an email.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhether a similar issue could occur again is a question for AWS, which controls a significant portion of global internet infrastructure and cloud hosting,\u201d Gibson said. \u201cUC Berkeley relies on their systems for Canvas availability, as do many other institutions and services nationwide.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Students and professors faced disruptions Monday after Canvas, a learning management system used by UC Berkeley,\u00a0went offline for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[15163,15160,15165,15166,12947,15167,15168,15164,7905,15162,143,145,144,15161,149],"class_list":{"0":"post-17733","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-amazon-web-services","9":"tag-bcourses","10":"tag-bearbuy","11":"tag-berkeley-it","12":"tag-canvas","13":"tag-chemistry-1a","14":"tag-ed-discussion","15":"tag-grubhub","16":"tag-kyle-gibson","17":"tag-michaela-mattes","18":"tag-oakland","19":"tag-oakland-headlines","20":"tag-oakland-news","21":"tag-ry-papadopoulos","22":"tag-uc-berkeley"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}