Hailey Whitlock, Staff Writer

On Oct. 20 2025, students and faculty alike across La Salle University’s campus were greeted with a Canvas outage. Canvas is a platform that La Salle University and many other colleges across the nation rely upon to host communication between faculty and students, allowing students to view and submit assignments and access study materials prior to exams.

This outage exposed just how much we have grown to rely on technology and how fragile the cloud based infrastructure can be. Even with the platform down for only a day, it prompted issues for teachers, many of whom were unable to send class announcements as the roster they relied on was in Canvas. Students were unable to submit assignments and faced issues studying for exams without the ability to access the information posted by their instructors.

What many students did not realize prior to the outage is that Canvas, like many platforms such as Ring, Venmo, Robinhood and Snapchat, is reliant on the Amazon Web Services (AWS.) Craig Shue, a professor and head of the computer science department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute said to CBS News, “Frankly, many customers may have been unaware that a service they used relied upon AWS and are only learning that now, due to system failures.” 

Amazon Web Services is a cloud-based infrastructure that supports many platforms; per CBS News, the company controls 38% of the cloud computing infrastructure market. Per CBS News, during the 15 hour outage Downdetector reported 11 million outage complaints with 3 million reports logged by US users. As reported by CRN, the event occurred when two automated systems updated at the same time. 

When confronted with the outage Dave McCarthy, a leader of global research in cloud computing at the International Data Center, stated to CBS News, “[The] outage is a stark reminder of the massive ‘concentration risk’ the global economy has accepted by building on a handful of cloud providers.”

A former AWS executive had a different view on the matter. As reported by CRN, he stated, “Given their global scale and the complexity of these distributed systems, it’s actually remarkable that large-scale disruptions like this are as rare as they are. The question is not if, but when.” 

Following this outage, a question on people’s minds is just how much this event impacts Amazon from a financial perspective. CyberCube, a leading cyber risk analytics company, released a preliminary estimate of the losses incurred. They reported a loss range of $38 million to $551 million. The Security Incident report mentioned by CyberCube states, “Moreover, we expect AWS to reimburse companies for downtimes and to avoid lawsuits. In light of the short duration of the event, companies may decide it is not worth the hassle to claim. These considerations would point more in the direction of our low estimates.” The insurance policies purchased by Amazon will cover the bulk of these expenses. 

Overall, while the AWS outage caused significant financial losses, these payments will be primarily covered by Amazon’s insurance policy. Most likely Amazon will pay customers for the downtime companies faced. With these measures, they hope to mitigate further lawsuits which could greatly inflate the costs of this event.