Canvas and OIT services outage update

Dear CU Educators,

Canvas, along with several other OIT-supported services, is currently unavailable due to an on-going nation-wide outage with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which hosts these services. Other impacted services include iClicker and Qualtrics. Canvas began reporting issues at approximately 1:00 a.m. MT on October 20 and the service has been unavailable since approximately 7:15 a.m. MT. The vendors are working to restore their services as quickly as possible and OIT is actively monitoring the issue.

We recognize the outage has a significant impact on teaching and learning on campus, and we apologize for the disruption. We are here to support you and your students in mitigating the impacts.

Here are some suggestions to assist during and after the outage:

• If any of your courses have Canvas due dates affected by the outage, please plan to adjust those deadlines.
• We also recommend that you communicate with your students, acknowledging the outage, and provide information on how you plan to proceed if the outage disrupts their ability to submit work.
• To email your students while Canvas is unavailable, you can use the Course Roster Email feature in the Faculty Course Toolkit in MyCUInfo.
• Hold off on using iClicker until the outage has been resolved.
• Please also consider extending submission windows (or waiving late penalties) where appropriate.

You can review the OIT Service Alert page for updates on all the impacted OIT Services and the Canvas Status page for the most current information about the availability of Canvas.

If you have questions or need assistance, please contact the IT Service Center at oithelp@colorado.edu or 303-735-4357. OIT’s Academic Technology Consultants are available to provide one-on-one support.

Thank you for your patience and support of students during the outage.

Office of Information Technology