PHOTO COURTESY OF THETIGERCU.COM

Photo of the Canvas page malfunctioning

Imagine this. It’s 11:57 p.m. You are frantically trying to submit your last assignment and suddenly, the internet breaks. That was the reality for thousands of students across the United States when Canvas went down, alongside other platforms connected to Amazon Web Services.

AWS is the backbone of many websites, notably Snapchat, Venmo and Duolingo. Many of these affected services were directly linked to AWS infrastructure. One cloud region in Northern Virginia glitched, which escalated into failures in the internal systems, which led to many worried students this week.

Zoom meetings froze, Venmo transactions ceased and Alexa went silent. It was an unsettling pause. The reactions that erupted on platforms like TikTok were along the lines of students cursing Canvas as they lost their work or were unable to submit their work. 

Whether because of procrastination, to squeeze out as much work as possible or just for the rush, many of us, including myself, submit assignments at the last minute. You can only imagine the frustration we faced from Canvas shutting down just before we hit submit.

This is not the first time AWS has had a failure, either. The only reason we noticed this time is because, since 2021, when the last outage happened, a lot more services have been connected to AWS. 

Back then, the outage only took down a few streaming services and online stores. This time, the impact was felt on a massive level; banking systems, social media and emergency communications. 

The true amount lost due to this outage will take weeks to calculate. Besides the monetary loss, people’s work and time were also lost. 

These companies use the fastest and cheapest options. They never think systems like AWS will fail. They thought wrong.

Amazon is not the only company to blame for this, as the whole ecosystem is built on multiple companies like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, which have a clientele of millions of customers. 

Although this issue was fixed quickly, our digital infrastructure is not invincible. This should be a lesson for companies to diversify and strengthen their systems to avoid outages like this again.

Categories: Opinion