Commotion arose among Stan State students after Canvas, the online learning platform used for course assignments, temporarily shut down on October 20th. For at least half the day, a nationwide web outage disrupted multiple websites and services, leaving students and faculty unable to access key academic tools.

The Canvas outage started at 12:04 a.m. all the way to roughly 3:50 p.m. when services came back up. After services came back up there was still some issues for the Android System Webview (ASW) affecting android users.

Vanessa Valente, an Administrative Support Coordinator in the English department, shared how she was not personally affected but heard of the impact of the shut down.

“I’ve heard many students complain that they can’t get to their assignments, I’ve heard faculty express their disappointment. As if they’re stuck and they cannot do anything further with this system shut down,” Valente remarked.

Sebastian Pena (Senior, Psychology) described how the Canvas outage impacted his coursework.

“I’m taking two seminar classes right now and I have homework on both of them, including the more psychology classes that I have to do. So, it has greatly affected my due dates for homework as of now,” Pena states.

Pena goes on to mention how about two to three of his psychology professors have reached out to his classes and extended the due dates for some assignments.

Although some of his professors extended due dates for some assignments he still worries about what will happen to the assignments that he had due in the morning of the outage. He described them as being crucial assignments for him to receive credit for his writing proficiency course.

Dulce Villalobos (Junior, Business) expressed her concern for the shutdown as it halted her plans to study and do class work.

“I mean, I wanted to study and take notes, but I couldn’t because I couldn’t go into the files. So, I wasn’t able to actually study and lock in.” Villalobos said.

She further explained that only one out of six professors reached out to extend due dates for assignments.

Donovan Armstrong (Junior, Business) another student among many affected by the temporary shut down.

Armstrong shared how his classes were not affected the day of the shutdown, but he has concerns for future assignments.

“I didn’t have any classes that were affected today but I have an experiential project due Wednesday that I wanted to get some work done on but I couldn’t open it because canvas was shut down.” Says Armstrong.

Armstrong went on to talk about how he has yet to hear from any of his professors today, adding worry about what is happening with his project that is due on Wednesday.

“None of my professors have reached out to me today,” he said.

At the end of commotion, although services were restored for desktop users some students and faculty were still unable to log back into Canvas mobile app.

For students and faculty unable to get back into the Canvas mobile app, Office of Information Technology (OIT), shared in an email that people should try refreshing their app. If there are more issues, the Office of Academic Technology (OAT) should be contacted.