When the massive cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an all-day outage caused by a Domain Name System error on Oct. 21, it caused problems all over the world, including the shutdown of Canvas, the school’s learning management system.
Experts say these kinds of errors are fairly common, as they occur whenever a site name, such as google.com, is unable to be translated to a readable IP address.
However, this one shutdown rippled into over 2,000 affected companies, including social media platforms Snapchat and Reddit, games Roblox and Fortnite, The New York Times and most importantly for students, Canvas and Collegeboard.
The problems prevented students from submitting homework and forced many teachers to alter their curriculum that day. For example, English teacher Emily Wu had planned on having her AP Lang class do their first AP-style in-class essay, but since students were unable to access Canvas, the class wrote their essays on paper.
AP Art History and MAP Teacher Joel Tarbox had to change his curriculum.
“It messed up that day because I was going to introduce a new unit on medieval art,” Tarbox said. “It started with a group project where they work together to research and make a presentation, [but] that’s on Canvas.”
Although he managed to get by that day, Tarbox mentioned not knowing what to do if this outage was long-term, as his classes are all heavily dependent on Canvas.
Students like those in math teacher PJ Yim’s classes had issues doing their homework because the only way to access notes and resources online was through Canvas. This led many students to panic when they found out Canvas was down.
“I knew there was homework due, but I had no way of knowing what it was, where it was and when to submit it,” sophomore Yaryar Chen said.
Yim decided that he needed to find a long-term solution to problems like these, so he set up a class Discord server. In Discord, he had a section for homework, whiteboard photos and announcements.
Discord provided many additional features, including homework help through chats and other functions not available to Canvas. Additionally, Yim said the photo uploading feature in Discord is less complicated. Moving forward, Yim sees a way Discord could be eventually integrated into the class.
