Canvas and GrubHub were down for most of Monday due to an AWS outage. Credit: Sandra Fu | Managing Photo Editor
Homework remained unfinished and on-campus food wait times soared as CarmenCanvas and Grubhub were inaccessible for most of Monday.
Sites across the country were unavailable as Amazon’s cloud computing system — Amazon Web Services (AWS) — faced widespread disruption early Monday morning, according to the Associated Press.
For Ohio State, CarmenCanvas, the university’s learning based management system, and Grubhub, the app for on-campus food pick-up and delivery ordering system, were down until early Monday night.
Amazon said the root cause of the issue was a system responsible for monitoring the health of the network load balancers, which distributes online traffic across multiple targets. The balancers make sure the traffic requests are only sent to healthy targets. When it isn’t, users experience service interruptions.
For students and faculty attempting to access Carmen, a graphic would appear with text below stating “Canvas is experiencing issues due to an ongoing AWS incident,” and in smaller text, “We are working on recovering as soon as possible.”
The Grubhub app did not show any errors when the app was opened.
The Grubhub app was restored between 4 and 5 p.m., according to University Spokesperson, Dave Isaacs.
Two hours later, the Office of Technology and Digital Innovation (OTDI) sent an email at 7:56 p.m. that said CarmenCanvas was restored at 7:10 p.m.
TopHat, which is used for quizzes, polls and discussions, is still experiencing delays, according to the Ohio State system status page.
The outage affected 70,000 students across all six campuses and more than 9,000 courses, according to Dan Hedman, a university spokesperson.
Here is a recap of the outage.
Amazon first reported the outage around 3:30 a.m. and said it found the potential root cause around 5 a.m. Most affected services began working 30 minutes later except for areas in the Eastern Time Zone.
Carmen was back up early Monday morning, but suffered another outage after 8 a.m., per prior Lantern reporting.
GrubHub was down around 11 a.m. due to the outage. Students were not able to place pick-up or delivery orders, order robot delivery or order a reusable box at Traditions locations, per prior Lantern reporting. This caused longer wait times for in-person ordering when kiosks also failed to work.
At 11:22 a.m., OTDI sent a university-wide email stating Carmen was currently unavailable and it did not know when the site would be restored.
Around 11:45 a.m., Amazon said it found the root cause of the issue and began to take steps to fix it.
Between 4 and 5 p.m., the food service app became functional again, according to Isaacs.
The learning site remained down until 7:10 p.m., according to OTDI. At 7:56 p.m., the office sent an email announcing the restoration.
OTDI said if there are any issues to report them to the learning systems team at [email protected] or 614-688-4357.
