AWS outage wasn't all headaches for some college kids who got extra time for assignments, exams

While assignment due dates were pushed back, students were without such their often essential Grubhub and Venmo apps.

By Andy Parr

Published: October 21, 2025 9:01pm

The major outage of Amazon Web Services on Monday caused problems for commercial and personal users, forcing them to temporarily go offline – but it was a boon for some college students across the country.

One of the AWS services is Canvas, an assignment interface used by over 50% of North American college students, according to its parent company, Instructure.

The outage began early Monday morning, prompting Instructure to release status updates throughout the day.

Unfortunately for colleges, the majority of Monday’s updates read “We are continuing to work with Amazon Web Services looking into our Canvas, Mastery Connect and other Instructure products being down.”

Students from the University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University and Ithaca College all reported that their universities did not mandate assignment extensions.

However, all of them said that most professors provided extensions if an assignment was due either Monday or Tuesday. One even said an exam scheduled for Monday was pushed all the way out to early November.

Many professors had to pivot during lecture slots as well. With many losing access to class materials, many improvised shortened lectures and some canceled classes altogether.

The outage also created other problems for the students.

“The thing that hit the hardest was Grubhub was down,” said Carys Owen, a junior at Ithaca College. “I would guess like half the school just didn’t eat yesterday.”

In addition, Venmo went dark and students couldn’t pay back friends for group purchases. Prime Video was unavailable for a relaxing night of streaming after a day of classes.

While many of the services lost can be lived without, it shows the changing landscape of college culture and how reliant both students and universities are on online services.

Instructure marked the outage as “resolved” just after 9 p.m. Eastern on Monday. AWS confirmed all affected services were back online Tuesday morning.