On Monday, Oct. 20, the Claremont Colleges experienced a dual shutdown of services: a Canvas outage by day, and a power outage by night.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a cloud-computing platform that hosts online services like Venmo, Snapchat and Canvas. Early Monday morning, AWS had a massive outage, bringing down thousands of websites and applications across the Internet.
Kit Kumar CM ’26 said their experience in a finance course suffered due to the Canvas outage.
Kumar said that students are usually required to download materials from Canvas to use during the class. Their professor also didn’t know how to find the necessary material in his Google Drive.
“The professor tried to draw out an Excel spreadsheet on the whiteboard,” they said. “Suffice it to say, did not really go as well as he had hoped.”
John Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, escaped the Canvas shutdown relatively unscathed due to his blog.
For 15 years, Professor Pitney had uploaded all of his lecture notes and syllabi on a Blogger site for his students. Although Canvas was shut down, he and his students were able to access all the material they needed.
“I just sort of got into the habit of using Blogger, and that enabled me to bypass some of the difficulties, first with Sakai, which sometimes went down, and now Canvas,” he said.
Pitney said he has never had an issue with Blogger, which, during previous shutdowns of learning management systems, has been like a “Lexus lane” during a traffic jam.
“Students sometimes roll their eyes when I mention Blogger, because it’s associated with blogs, which is the kind of technology that people’s grandparents use,” he said. “But it’s handy, it works and I expect to keep using it.”
AWS repaired major issues by around 4 p.m., but the day’s hurdles were far from over. At around 8:30 p.m., a power outage struck most areas of the 7Cs.
Repair work was scheduled from 9 p.m. until 2 a.m. by the electric utility company Southern California Edison. For this, power would be shut down momentarily at 9 p.m., but substation generators across the campuses were expected to kick in for the duration of the work, according to an email sent to Scripps College students.
“A brief outage of less than 1 minute is expected as we transition from SCE power to generator power,” the email read. “It is not expected that this outage will have a significant impact on those in the residential system.”
But Edison initiated the drop 30 minutes early, disrupting the 7C electrical system and “resulting in a malfunction,” according to an email from The Claremont Colleges Services (TCCS) Vice President of Finance Vanessa H. Aguirre.
“Because the power was cut earlier than planned, the substation electrical equipment did not have sufficient time to properly transition,” Aguirre wrote.
Marian Mahasantipiya PZ ’27 had an econometrics midterm scheduled for the day after the outages. Initially, with the Canvas outage, she said that she was able to “go back and forth” with her professor to send her the necessary documents. But two hours after she got them, the power went out.
“I really needed to sit down and focus and learn material in the short time frame before the exam, so the outage and Canvas not working interrupted those flows,” she said.
“I really needed to sit down and focus and learn material in the short time frame before the exam, so the outage and Canvas not working interrupted those flows.”
With her phone and iPad close to dying, Mahasantipiya also said she was worried she “wouldn’t be able to study and do well on the midterm.”
Following their troubles with their finance course during the Canvas shutdown, Kumar said that they had to confront the issue of their medication, which requires refrigeration, during the ensuing power outage.
During planned power outages, they said they can prepare for the outage by stocking extra ice in their freezer or moving medication into an icebox. This unexpected outage took them by surprise.
“I wasn’t concerned for the first hour, [but] I definitely knew it was not good,” Kumar said. “As time went on, I was like, ‘Okay, well, there’s not a lot I can do because if my power is out, everyone else’s power is out.’”
They said the lack of updates from the administration and Edison Power was understandable but still unfortunate.
“I only got all their communication when power was restored,” they said. “I appreciate they tried to communicate, but also, fundamentally, that’s not terribly helpful.”
TCCS told Edison to cancel repairs and “restore power to the campuses as soon as possible,” according to Aguirre. At around 10 p.m., the power returned.
Facebook Comments