Amazon Web Services outage impacting campus Canvas users 

At about 8 a.m. today, Amazon Web Services, which hosts Canvas on its servers, began experiencing an outage that has impacted Canvas users across the country, including a number of classes taking finals at Western. 

ATUS is monitoring the outage; the current status of AWS’s servers is available here: https://status.aws.amazon.com/. The current status of Instructure Canvas is available here: https://status.instructure.com/.

In cases where synchronous final exams were interrupted, these exams may need to be rescheduled, an alternative final format such as an asynchronous final implemented, or the final canceled.   

Note that, if an exam is rescheduled, it is important not to schedule the alternative time for the exam during a period when students might have finals for other courses.  

For more information about Canvas interruptions and delays, go to https://tlc.wwu.edu/2021/12/07/canvas-quiz-interruptions-delays/. 

For assistance rescheduling exams in Canvas, please contact Canvas Help or the ATUS Help Desk at CanvasHelp@wwu.edu or 360-650-7900. 

There is not yet an estimated time for the service to be restored; faculty may want to wait until the restoration is complete before scheduling a make-up exam time. 

2:55 p.m. Canvas update: Amazon Web Services has reported improvement in availability across most AWS services. They are now independently working through service-by-service recovery, and should eventually reach Instructure's Canvas data storage on AWS; some faculty are reporting the ability to connect to the service and their classes. Check your class availability.