The AWS outage affects Canvas and other apps – The Observer

On Monday, Oct 20, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced problems from around 3:11 a.m. Eastern Time to 6:01 p.m. later that day. In technical terms, the health monitoring system of network load balancers inside AWS’s Elastic Compute Cloud 2 (EC2) internal network in US-East-1 malfunctioned. Simply put, there was a database malfunction in a major cloud computing hub. Amazon reported increased error rates and connectivity issues across multiple services across the United States. AWS is a cloud computing platform that provides technology infrastructure, such as data processing, storage and management to other companies that purchase it. Instead of buying hardware and infrastructure that needs to be maintained, companies can simply rent the services it runs on from AWS. Because AWS already has and operates the infrastructure needed to power Amazon, they are able to also rent their cloud services out to others for a profit. However, AWS sharing its service with these companies also means it powers them. These companies include apps like Zoom, Reddit, Snapchat, Duolingo, Microsoft 365 and more. For some of these companies, like Snapchat and Duolingo, websites and services were completely down during the outage, while some just experienced slowdowns.  Canvas was one of the apps
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