Data center outage in Northern Virginia shuts down VCU’s Canvas for hours
Canvas — the primary platform for assignments and course materials at VCU — was among numerous services shut down following a data center outage in Northern Virginia on Monday.
Andrew Kerley, Executive Editor
Canvas for VCU went offline for at least eight hours on Monday after a network of data centers in Northern Virginia run by Amazon Web Services experienced widespread outages — knocking out thousands of apps and websites.
Canvas — the primary platform for assignments and course materials at VCU — Smartsheet, Top Hat, RealSource and Trello are among VCU services that went offline, according to the university’s IT Status page.
The outage originated in Amazon’s US-EAST-1 region of data centers located in Northern Virginia, according to Reuters. The region is often referred to as the “data center capital of the world.”
Snapchat, Reddit, Paypal, Venmo, Duolingo, Toast, Roblox, Fortnite and Ring video doorbells are all among a significant amount of services being affected globally. Amazon Web Services is the world’s largest cloud provider.
AWS resolved the issue at 3:53 p.m., according to the latest update posted on the company’s service page. Websites were gradually restored throughout the afternoon.
