On October 20, 2025, Canvas, the well-known learning platform used by hundreds of schools and universities across North America, experienced an outage, leaving countless students and teachers unable to log in, access course material, or submit assignments. It went down in the early morning and lasted for over 12 hours. Many thought it was just their Wi-Fi until they saw posts about it, which determined that Canvas was completely down. The issue was suspected to be caused by a problem with Amazon Web Services, which controls Canvas’s servers. Amazon Web Services runs six percent of all websites, and as a result, students across the country were affected. Students turned to social media to see if others were having the same problem. Despite disrupting classes, some teachers made compromises so that students wouldn’t fall behind. 

At La Jolla High School, students said the shutdown came at one of the worst times, right before an important deadline or test. Freshman Cesar Mariscal stated, “It affected me because I needed to do my work and I needed to turn an important assignment in, and it showed as missing, which was frustrating.” Other students seemed to share the same stressful feeling with the shutdown, “I had an important essay, so we were all kind of worried that we wouldn’t be able to turn it in on the deadline.” Sophomore, Sophia Meyer added.  

Although the Canvas platform wasn’t down for too long, it definitely highlights the importance of these technologies for schools to teach and how quickly problems can emerge when they are unavailable. To problem-solve when issues like this arise, student Sophia Meyer, a sophomore, also suggested, “Definitely having an alternate method for turning in stuff, like a Google Classroom.” Both Canvas and schools could use this experience to strengthen their systems and communication.