On Monday, Oct. 20, UNH experienced a day-long outage of Canvas. Many professors were unsure how to communicate with their students without using the software. Students were unable to submit assignments or access many of their daily apps, such as Snapchat or Amazon.
“It wouldn’t even open,” said Kallie Gagne, a junior at UNH, who was frustrated with the way the Canvas outage halted her progress on assignments. Gagne stated that she couldn’t turn anything in or see what homework was listed. She was worried about due dates and upcoming exams because she was not able to access the materials to study.
Professors found themselves equally stuck. Many rely on Canvas for nearly every form of class communication. Although alternative tools exist—such as emailing class lists directly—some instructors were unsure how to reach students without the platform.
Alicia Medros, the assistant vice president for teaching and learning technologies, communicated about the matter. She sent out an email to all students addressing the outage, along with Matthew MacManes, Interim Vice Provost for Academic Affairs.
“We can’t assume the outage won’t last a long time,” said Medros.
Between October 19th and 20th, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced a major outage in its Northern Virginia region (us-east-1) that disrupted many popular internet services worldwide. The issue was traced to a “latent race condition,” which is a hidden timing bug in software that caused two automated processes to interfere with each other within AWS’s Amazon DynamoDB system. DynamoDB is a cloud-based database service used by countless apps to store and retrieve data quickly.
This glitch caused an outdated DNS (Domain Name System) configuration to overwrite the correct one, which essentially erased the “internet phonebook” entries that tell computers how to locate DynamoDB’s servers. Without those DNS records, other AWS services couldn’t communicate properly.
As a result, Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud), which provided virtual servers for running applications, began to fail or lose connectivity. Engineers restored the DNS setup around 2:25 AM PDT, and full recovery followed later that day. However, universities like UNH felt the impacts throughout the day.
AWS said it has since disabled the faulty automation globally and is strengthening safeguards to prevent similar chain reactions in the future. Due to this outage, many are now questioning their trust in one of the cloud infrastructure market’s top companies.
According to Felix Richter, a data journalist for Statista, in the second quarter of 2025, AWS led the global cloud infrastructure market with a 30% share, followed by Microsoft Azure at 20% and Google Cloud at 13%. This adds up to a combined total of over 60% for the top three providers.
Global spending on cloud infrastructure grew 25% this past year, rising by $20 billion to reach $99 billion for the quarter. For the full year, revenues are expected to surpass $400 billion for the first time, driven largely by the AI boom and its high demand for computing power, keeping competition in the cloud sector intense despite its massive scale.
AWS operates hundreds of data centers that power the multi-trillion-dollar economy.
Medros explained that despite there being alternative ways faculty can communicate with students, many professors did not have the information on how to utilize these alternative ways. Professors didn’t know how to email their classes, despite having access to the tools they could have used to message.
Medros stated that UNH is diversified in its software; however, the main issue is making sure that information and alternative tools are easy to find for students and faculty.
Medros said that there was communication with Canvas. The company was equally caught off guard by the outage because Canvas is simply a vendor of the data center and does not have control over its code.
Most UNH systems bounced back early the next day, but the outage raised big questions that students and faculty say still don’t have clear answers:
- How do we communicate if Canvas is unavailable?
- What alternatives can be put in place immediately?
- How can UNH reduce reliance on a single cloud provider?
University leaders said they are reviewing their emergency plans and communication strategies, but much remains uncertain.
For now, UNH is still assessing what changes are needed and whether the current systems are resilient enough to withstand the next major outage. Until then, the future of digital preparedness at UNH is still very much up in the air.
