Canvas Quiz 503 - Service Unavailable

[AbigailKim]

I'm currently trying to do a quiz on Canvas but it says the service is unavailable due to maintenance. How long will the site be down?

[bwsf]

Hello. I hope that you were finally able to access your quiz. It is really nerve-wracking not knowing what's going on with the tool you need.

When there are planned outages, Canvas announces them to admins, who may pass on the announcement if they think their users will need it. They might be balancing this against the distraction factor of putting another announcement into everyone's feed.

You could try asking your campus Canvas admin if they announce upcoming / current maintenance anywhere, or if they could start to do that. Another approach is to search for a school in your time zone that uses Canvas and publishes announcements. For instance, by searching around for something like "Canvas planned outage November 13" I found that Georgetown publishes this info, including how long they expected the maintenance to take and that New Quizzes were affected.

I hope that helps for next time! Or better yet, that it helps you plan around future outages!

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hi there, @AbigailKim ...

I don't see any major issues listed on the Canvas Status page for today: Instructure Status.

If you are still having issues, you might want to contact folks at your school who work with Canvas on a daily basis.  For example, I spent a minute or two browsing the UC Riverside website, and I found the following Canvas support page:

Canvas Support Center | Canvas

If they are unable to help, you might be able to reach out directly to Canvas Support via the "Help" icon which is located in Canvas on the far left-hand global navigation menu.  Depending on what level of support UC Riverside has purchased from Instructure (the folks that make Canvas), you may or may not be able to contact Canvas Support directly.  But, the UC Riverside Canvas administrator(s) should know what kind of support they have with Instructure.

How do I get help with Canvas?

I hope this extra information will be of some help to you.