If you tried logging into Canvas Monday morning and were greeted with little robots tinkering on a broken spaceship, you weren’t alone. HCC’s systems don’t seem to be the culprit—but rather Amazon Web Services (AWS), the giant cloud that quietly powers much of the modern internet.

The massive AWS outage rippled across the U.S. early Monday, taking down major sites and services, including Canvas, the digital home base for most college students. The problem originated in AWS’s U.S.–East-1 region (Virginia), where a network failure caused widespread slowdowns and login errors.

According to Amazon, the trouble began inside its Elastic Compute Cloud network—the system companies use to rent virtual servers and computing power instead of maintaining expensive hardware of their own. In simpler terms, EC2 is what keeps many of your favorite websites running behind the scenes.

Amazon said the internal system that tracks how much traffic and strain customers put on its servers malfunctioned, throwing the whole network out of balance. To prevent things from getting worse, AWS temporarily limited how many new server companies could spin up while engineers worked to get everything back online.

As of now, Canvas remains offline. HCC’s IT team confirmed in an alert that the platform is experiencing technical issues “due to Amazon cloud being offline,” and that the vendor is actively working to fix the problem. Students can expect an update once Canvas is back to normal.

So, while the outage may be inconvenient (and a little panic-inducing for anyone with deadlines looming), it’s also a reminder that the cloud isn’t invincible. Even a minor failure in a far-off data center can leave students unable to access assignments or submit work on time, underscoring the need for backup plans and flexibility.

For updates from Amazon directly, you can visit their AWS Health Dashboard.