Early last week, students across campus found themselves staring at blank screens instead of assignments when Canvas, Samford’s main online learning platform, suddenly went offline. What began as a normal Monday morning quickly devolved into a scramble for professors and students as the outage disrupted quizzes, postponed tests and stalled progress.
“I had two tests that were supposed to be Tuesday that got postponed until Thursday,” said senior Ann Claire Hannah. “And my teachers said that they weren’t even able to grade any of their student’s work”
For hours, no one really knew what had gone wrong. Many assumed that it was a Samford-exclusive Canvas glitch. However, as the day went on, it became clear that the problem was much bigger. The outage was traced back to Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing giant that hosts data and infrastructure for thousands of companies, including Canvas.
Joseph McCormick, the university’s Tech Services Chief Information Officer, explained the issue.
“The root cause reportedly was a technical error during an update to AWS’s internal systems, specifically affecting DNS resolution,” he said. “This disruption prevented many applications for many companies, including Canvas, from connecting to their servers that Amazon hosts for them”
The problem, McCormick says, was not something that Samford IT teams could fix.
“Unfortunately, in a problem like what occurred, companies like Canvas are at the mercy of the support they receive and communication they get from Amazon,” he said. “This also means that we depend upon updates from them on how the situation is going”
While classes, assignments and student’s daily routine eventually resumed as normal, the outage revealed a surprising fact to many students: Amazon’s reach extends far beyond online shopping. The same company that delivers packages and runs Prime Video also powers much of the internet’s unseen skeletal system, hosting services for platforms like Netflix, Spotify and even some major financial institutions.
“I had no idea,” said junior Natalee Johns. “And I think it’s kind of scary”
As the digital world becomes more interconnected, a single technical error can ripple across industries and campuses alike.
McCormick was thankful for the flexibility of students and professors during the shutdown.
“We appreciate the patience of our students and faculty during this unexpected disruption,” he said.
For many, this incident was not only a minor inconvenience, but a reminder of just how dependent daily life has become on the unseen cloud above.
Staff Reporter
