AWS outage ripples across campus life: UW Tacoma, Canvas, Snapchat and Fortnite all hit

A major Amazon Web Services incident on Oct. 20 knocked out popular apps and the Canvas learning platform used by half of U.S. college students, interrupting classes and campus tools at UW Tacoma and beyond.

By Syed Huzaifa Bin Afzal

A sweeping outage at Amazon Web Services (AWS) early Monday, Oct. 20, disrupted a wide slice of the internet from social apps and games to the learning tools students rely on every day. 

AWS is the behind-the-scenes cloud that powers thousands of services and when it faltered, so did much of daily digital life. 

By late day, Amazon said service was restored, but recovery for many apps was gradual. Canvas is used by 50% of college and university students in North America, including all IVY League schools in the U.S., according to Associated Press. 

The incident centered in AWS’s US-EAST-1 region in Northern Virginia and was traced to a Domain Name System (DNS), the internet’s phone book. When DNS can’t translate a service’s name into its correct number (address), apps can’t find where to connect, so pages won’t load and logins fail. 

In this case, DNS lookups to DynamoDB, an AWS database service used by many apps, failed, which cascaded across other services, according to BBC. 

Canvas experienced widespread login and access failures tied to the AWS incident. Student newspapers and campus IT alerts across the country documented disruptions to submissions, gradebook access and course pages during the outage window, with service returning to normal operations at 6 p.m. eastern as AWS stabilized. 

UW-IT acknowledged the AWS outage and warned that several UW tri-campus services were affected including Canvas, Panopto, MyUW and UW Connect (ServiceNow), according to University of Washington Tacoma. 

Students and instructors at UW Tacoma saw intermittent access or timeouts across multiple systems used for lectures, recordings and advising. As AWS applied mitigations, services recovered gradually. 

At UWT, students felt the outage immediately. As core learning tools stalled, those who rely on lecture recordings for weekly revision lost access during critical study windows. 
 
“I couldn’t access prior class recordings which were essential for revising coursework,” said Jeremy Odero, Master of Cybersecurity & Leadership at UWT. 

In other classes, instruction stopped altogether, leaving commuters stranded when assignments and courseware were unreachable. 

“Our class ended,” said Tristen Hughes, accounting major, class of 2028 at UWT. “Assignments were only on Canvas. I felt bad for commuters who drove over half an hour just to be turned away.”  

Other universities also had knock-on effects beyond Canvas. Rutgers flagged issues with Kaltura, Smartsheet and Adobe Creative Cloud, according to Rutgers. Western Washington University advised the campus that Canvas was back but might remain flaky while Instructure, the Canvas parent company, finished recovery, according to WWU. 

Users found popular apps messing up such as Snapchat not refreshing, messages lagging and Fortnite party’s not launching.  Reporting throughout the day also confirmed interruptions at Coinbase, Robinhood and many more high-traffic platforms that sit on AWS, according to PBS. 

Food and retail apps were also hit, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. McDonald’s customers reported app troubles during the morning rush, illustrating how a cloud hiccup can spill directly into real-world lines.  

The AWS hyperscale cloud region going down revealed how broad the impact was because so many apps depend on the same system.