On Monday, at 12:11 a.m., Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) experienced an outage to its web services, affecting Stanford’s teaching and learning abilities. Key University-provided services such as Canvas, Smartsheet and Bswift (Open Enrollment) were among those affected.

By 3:01 p.m., AWS wrote that all cloud services had returned to normal operations.

The Canvas outage hindered courses that use the platform for grading, messaging, assignments and discussions. According to Stanford Teaching Commons, “Over 2,400 instructors and 19,000 students use Canvas in 2,000 courses every quarter across Stanford.” Each quarter, Canvas pages are automatically created for each course, and are made available when instructors publish them. 

In an email to The Daily, University spokesperson Luisa Rapport wrote, “[University IT] UIT, VPSA, and teams across the university are actively engaged and working with our cloud partners to remain informed on restoration of services.”

In a campus-wide email at 10:43 a.m., UIT wrote that engineers are “continuing to perform testing across services” to determine the scope of impact.

In a morning public announcement, AWS wrote that the original cause of the connectivity issues was due to “an underlying internal subsystem responsible for monitoring the health of our network load balancers.” AWS outages have also previously occurred in 2023 and 2021.

The outage also impacted social media platforms that AWS services, such as FaceBook, Snapchat and Reddit.

Other services including Confluence and Qualtrics may continue experiencing issues as they return online, according to UIT.

UIT will provide their next update by 8 a.m. on Tuesday.