Canvas Down to Amazon Web Services’s EC2 Failure

At 2:04 AM, Canvas went down. The site went down due to a problem with its web service, Amazon Web Services (AWS), experiencing slow performance or just failing in the first place. 

Canvas wasn’t the only one affected. Thousands of other websites, including SnapChat and Reddit, have been down for hours. Reuters stated that this “marked the largest internet disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks and airports, and highlights the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected technologies.”

The root of the problem stems from AWS’s EC2 failure. The EC2, in simple terms, acts as a traffic cop that distributes internet traffic across multiple servers to balance the fluctuation of data. So, because it failed, it caused all the internet traffic to not be properly distributed which leads to slower performance and failure of websites (Reuters).

As of 3:03 CDT, AWS said “Service recovery across all AWS services continues to improve. We continue to reduce throttles for new EC2 Instance launches in the US-EAST-1 Region that were put in place to help mitigate impact. Lambda invocation errors have fully recovered and function errors continue to improve. We have scaled up the rate of polling SQS queues via Lambda Event Source Mappings to pre-event levels.”

In layman’s terms, things are improving. They are continuing to reduce the ‘brake’ for launching new websites (which was shut down to prevent the problem from worsening). The Lambda errors—which is code run on servers provided by AWS—have now been completely fixed and errors are lessening. AWS has now returned to the normal speed that it checks the SQS, or Simple Queue Service. Medium describes the SQS as “a message queue that can be used to store messages while waiting for a computer to process them” (Medium). For AWS SQS, it pretty much works as a queue system that lets multiple web applications communicate with each other.

AWS said they will send out another update at 3:45 PM CDT, but as of 3:47 PM CDT, no update has been made. For future updates, you can check https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status for AWS or https://status.instructure.com/ for Canvas specific updates. 

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