Amazon Web Services outage takes down Canvas and Piazza on Oct. 21
Students reported being unable to access course materials, submit assignments, and ask course-related questions
Vivian Hir–The Tech
On Monday, Oct. 21, MIT students were unable to access Canvas and Piazza because of an Amazon Web Service (AWS) outage that affected more than 1,000 businesses across the world, according to Downdetector.
At 3:11 a.m., AWS reported “increased error rates and latencies” for many AWS services in the US-EAST-1 region, which continued into the morning and afternoon. Other school-facing websites impacted by the outage included Panopto and Adobe Creative Cloud. Gradescope, however, was not impacted by the outage. Besides work-related sites, many other websites and apps, such as Reddit and Venmo, were down in the morning. According to a 2025 Statista report, AWS made up 32% of the global cloud infrastructure services vendor market from 2017 to 2024, sustaining widespread usage across businesses.
Students first noticed the error when they attempted to log into Canvas early in the morning: the website showed a cartoon error screen of robots fixing a broken spaceship and read, “Canvas is experiencing issues due to an ongoing AWS incident. We are working on recovering as soon as possible.” When Kami Wendelken ’29 saw that Canvas was down around 9 a.m., she first texted her friends to make sure she “wasn’t crazy,” only then to realize that her friends from other colleges also had the same issue.
Elizabeth Wright ’26 woke up early to study for a midterm later that day, but noticed that Canvas was unable to load previews of the course’s files. “I was thankfully able to download the practice exams I needed to study before around 8 a.m. when I realized that the entire site just didn’t seem to work,” Wright wrote.
As for Piazza, the site’s outage affected students’ progress on problem sets and preparation for midterms, as they were unable to ask questions or review previously answered queries. Jada Ogueh ’29 found it “really annoying” that she was unable to use Piazza to ask for help on the 6.1200 (Mathematics for Computer Science) problem set, which was due the next day at 12 p.m. Om Joshi G, a student in 6.7960 (Deep Learning), was also frustrated, writing, “All the important content is on Piazza, and the exam is tomorrow.”
Some students said that their professors did not provide any information on the issue and inadequately responded to the outage, while others reported that their instructors were more helpful. “They have already gotten us the work we need for this week and are trying to get the TAs up to speed so they can continue to help us,” Jaylee Bouwhuis ’29 wrote. MIT Information Systems & Technology did not send an email or publish an announcement regarding the AWS outage.
After more than 12 hours of being down, Canvas became accessible for most users at 7:16 p.m, and the issue was resolved at 9:02 p.m. according to Instructure’s status page. Meanwhile, Piazza’s service was restored around 3 p.m.
“Rain AND Canvas being down are usually not good signs for the start of the week,” Wendelken wrote.