Students and faculty across Kansas State are unsure how to proceed under the current AWS outage, Kate Kovanda, senior in animal sciences and industry, said. 

“I can’t submit an assignment for my equine exercise physiology class, and it’s due at 1:30 this afternoon,” Kovanda said.

Currently, when visiting K-State’s Canvas page, users are directed to an error page that reads, “Canvas is experiencing issues due to an ongoing AWS incident. We are working on recovering as soon as possible.” 

Kellen Hight, IT specialist for Collegian Media Group, explained the source of the problem. 

“Canvas hosts their platform on the AWS service and K-State hosts the other things on their own site, like the K-State website is fine, but everyone who uses the AWS system for load balancing and things like that are experiencing the inconvenience and chaos of the outage,” Hight said.

The outage took effect at 2:04 a.m. CST, according to status.instructure.com.  

Kylie Rogers, sophomore in animal sciences and industry, is concerned about how the outage will affect exams.

“I have an online midterm for my poultry lab that’s due tonight and I don’t know how that’s gonna work,” Rogers said.

This AWS outage applies to Amazon-hosted platforms including Canvas, Venmo, Zoom and more, according to Downdetector.com.

Hight said he wishes that the entire web wasn’t hosted on Amazon. 

“Amazon provides hosting services that literally everyone uses because they are cheap enough and mostly work, but when they experience a single point of failure then everyone is going to suffer,” Hight, junior in integrated computer science, said. 

Dr. Jeff Smith, professor of geography and geospatial science, said his online students have had to adjust. 

“Students taking my online course can’t get their assignments done,” Smith said. “I will have to extend the deadline a day or two after the outage has been fixed, and we don’t know when that is yet.” 

For continuous updates on the Canvas outage, visit instructure.status.com and ksu-hub.statushub.io.