Students respond to the Amazon Web Services global outage that disrupted access to Canvas and other websites and apps.
Transcript:
0:07: Welcome back to the Chronicle Chronversations.
0:10: I’m your guest host, Zahra Sandhu.
0:13: Canvas was completely offline on Monday, October 20th, due to a global outage at Amazon Web Services.
0:20: It wasn’t just Canvas that was impacted.
0:23: The McDonald’s app, Zoom, DoorDash, Snapchat, Venmo and Lyft also went down and stayed down until early evening.
0:32: The disruption happened because of a domain name system, or DNS error.
0:37: DNS is like the internet’s phone book, and when it’s not working, you can’t load content.
0:43: Here’s what Columbia College’s students have to say about the disruption.
0:47: You know, a lot of resources and a lot of stuff that we need was just, you know, gone and we couldn’t use it, and I saw a lot of people panicking online, talking about how, you know, they had tests and their study guides are online and you know, and everything and
1:04 My first class this morning, the professors always make announcements the day prior, so they had to do that over Outlook instead.
1:08: I’m lucky enough to have a teacher that personally reached out to the entire class saying, we know this is happening, we’re gonna give you some leeway, don’t stress about it, which was really helpful.
1:20: I’m really behind on homework and a lot of classes.
1:23: So I was hyping myself up yesterday being like, I’m gonna get in there and I’m gonna do it.
1:27: And then by the time I got to the library, Canvas was shut down and I couldn’t access anything.
1:32: So it personally halted my progress.
1:34: It kind of made my day a lot better, I’m not gonna lie.
1:38: It made me realize, like, life is worth living.
1:41: I’m a little sad that it’s back up, part of me felt like it was a vacation.
1:47: I was doing a bunch of homework the day before, and then I woke up, I was planning on doing it for another class, and I couldn’t. It wasn’t turning on, and I was like, oh, well, now I can enjoy my day, so I literally like, went out on a walk.
1:57: This episode was produced by Aidan Johnson.
2:00: I’m Zahra Sandhu.
2:02: Thanks for listening.
Copy edited by Matt Brady
