Addressing Canvas Outage 3/25/2021

[mloble]

Earlier today, one of the subsystems that Canvas relies on for service failed, causing a Canvas outage. The outage could have impacted up to 75% of our customers in North and South America if they were trying to access Canvas between 6:48 am and 8:27 am MT. Additionally, on March 3, Canvas users experienced an outage in the afternoon that lasted for 45 minutes due to a Canvas code update that overwhelmed a shared service. We know you expect more of us; we expect more of ourselves. And so we owe you an apology. 

When incidents like this happen, we perform an in depth root cause analysis that targets both the technical failure as well as any process breakdown that occurred. Our goal for this is to prevent similar issues from happening again and to constantly improve our response. 

The past year has been challenging and full of ups and downs for educators and students as the world grappled with the effects of the pandemic. Through it, we have been so impressed by your commitment to your students. We want Canvas to be part of the ups...not the downs and that requires us to be consistent with reliable technology. Thank you for letting Instructure be your partner. 

We are happy to speak live to discuss this more with you.

Best regards,

@mloble Melissa Loble, Chief Customer Experience Officer

@stownsend1  Steve Townsend, SVP of Engineering