Oh No! No Homework! Students, Online Education Frozen with Learning Zone Outage

By Kayla Milhon
Staff writer
IG: kaylaa.ml_

Students and faculty at Hutchinson Community College were unable to access Learning Zone during the morning on Oct. 20 due to a widespread outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud platform that hosts the college’s online learning system.

The outage began around 3 a.m. on Oct. 20, a Monday, and impacted multiple systems nationwide. Because Canvas, the platform that powers LearningZone, is hosted on AWS, it became unavailable as part of the disruption.

Rhonda Corwin, Director of Online Education at HutchCC, confirmed the cause of the downtime in a message to the campus community.

“At approximately 3 a.m. on Monday, October 20, Amazon Web Services (AWS) began experiencing an outage affecting multiple systems nationwide. Canvas, the platform used for Learning Zone, is hosted on AWS and was unavailable as a result,” Corwin said.

The outage affected many organizations across the country that rely on AWS, including Canvas’s parent company, Instructure.

In a message to Canvas users, Rachel Orston, Chief Customer Officer at Instructure, apologized for the inconvenience and explained the company’s response.

“We know how essential Canvas is to your daily work supporting teaching, learning, and student engagement, and we deeply regret the frustration and inconvenience this caused,” Orston said. “While the root issue originated with AWS and affected many organizations globally, we recognize the impact this had on you and your communities, and we take our responsibility to support you through it very seriously.”

Orston added that Instructure’s teams “worked continuously alongside AWS throughout the day to restore services as quickly and safely as possible. As of 8PM ET, AWS has alerted us that they believe the issue has been fully resolved.”

By Monday evening, LearningZone, along with related services such as Mastery and Studio, were back online. Instructure stated that it will continue monitoring system stability and posting updates on status.instructure.com.

While the outage was temporary, it disrupted access to online coursework and communication tools that students and instructors depend on daily.

“Please let me know if you have any other questions,” Corwin added in her message. “Thank you for your patience and understanding as we worked through this unexpected event.”

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