Canvas caused chaos for most of the day on Oct. 20. An Amazon Web Services outage brought the academic platform and many other websites to their knees.

The outage came during midterms, greatly limiting students’ ability to submit projects and tests. John Munguia, a third-year psychology major at San Jose City College, was on campus doing classwork while the outage was ongoing.

“Walking to class, I did hear a bunch of people saying they couldn’t submit some assignments,” said Munguia. “… I thought it was crazy.”

Deniz Ka, a math studies student, also faced difficulties when trying to complete work. “I didn’t have a class on Monday, but I had an essay due,” he said. “ …but [Canvas] was down and I couldn’t [submit it].”

Students were not able to fully use Canvas until it came back online later in the day. Instructors were more than willing to adjust deadlines to accommodate the situation.

“The fact that a lot of our activities are online and homework assignments, we have to give them extensions,” said Nathapong Shugan, who teaches English as a Second Language at SJCC. “We have to explain to them, first and foremost, that this is unforeseen, no one expected this, and secondly, we have to understand that students have deadlines.”

Some students were able to communicate with their instructors to work out a solution.

“I did talk to my teacher and we got everything figured out, but at the time I was like ‘I don’t know what to do,’ so it kinda just threw everything off course for me,” said Dante Solorio, who creates content for the Associated Student Government.

Instructors have the ability to move deadlines around when they see fit, so students were able to submit work later and save their grades.

“A lot of other teachers have explained that because the outage was unforeseen, they will provide extended time for students to submit,” said Shugan.

While Canvas did eventually come back online, students were able to count on their professors to provide leniency for the duration of the outage.