Many students logging into Canvas on Monday, Oct. 21, were met with an error message: “Canvas is experiencing issues due to an ongoing AWS incident.”

The online learning platform, along with thousands of other services, went down Monday morning following a massive outage of Amazon Web Services, or AWS. Other platforms impacted included Canva, Facebook, Delta Air Lines, Fortnite and Snapchat.

What is AWS?

AWS is Amazon’s cloud service provider. It operates on a subscription model, where companies pay a monthly fee to host their websites and applications on the cloud. AWS boasts a global reach, holding a roughly 30% share of the cloud server market and offering various security protections.

Why was AWS down?

AWS initially experienced what is known as a Domain Name System, or DNS, error. According to the company Cloudflare, DNS “translates domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load Internet resources.”

Amazon released a statement at 10:29 a.m. Monday, saying, “We continue to investigate the root cause for the network connectivity issues that are impacting AWS services such as DynamoDB, SQS, and Amazon Connect in the US-EAST-1 Region. We continue to investigate and identify mitigations.”

When did it work again?

The timeline for a full recovery was initially unclear.

Around noon, even after Amazon reported that most of its servers were up and running, many websites remained offline. Amazon later stated that work was still needed on connectivity and API recovery, with the issue stemming from a system that monitors network load.

As of approximately 2 p.m. Monday, Amazon said its systems were mostly restored, but some websites, including Canvas, remained down. Canvas servers eventually became fully operational again around 6:30 p.m. Central time.

This is a developing story.