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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (KRDO) - A global outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS) is impacting multiple cloud-based services in southern Colorado. The latest updates on the AWS status can be found here. A media representative for the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) confirmed to KRDO13 that Canvas is down, and some other platforms the university uses for internal projects. Canvas is a popular resource used by many universities for online classes, lectures, assignments, etc. UCCS tells KRDO13 students and staff are resilient after the pandemic and are flexible, adjusting where needed. KRDO13 also found that the Colorado College Canvas is down as well. Blackboard is another educational technology company that is experiencing connectivity issues. CSU Pueblo posted this to its Blackboard website: The Division of IT is continuing to monitor the global Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage. AWS provides cloud-based IT service such as computing power, storage, databases, and networking and powers many CSU services. Users can currently access Blackboard, but may experience interruptions to some features and tools within Blackboard during this outage. DoIT will continue to monitor the situation and will provide updates when the vendor has resolved the issue. Colorado Springs Academy School District 20 is alerting parents about the way the outage is impacting its schools. A spokesperson for D20 tells KRDO13 this will not impact the district's ability to get students home safely. KRDO13 obtained this letter sent to parents. We want to inform you that the D20 is currently experiencing widespread access issues with several of our critical online systems, including Infinite Campus (which affects access to report cards, transcripts, and IEP information), Schoology, and ParentSquare. This disruption is due to a major outage with Amazon Web Services (AWS), the technology provider used by many of our third-party vendors. What this means: You may encounter errors or be unable to log in to key district systems. System-generated reports, like report cards, may be unavailable. Please know that we are fully aware of these issues, but our ability to fix them is limited as they are tied to this external infrastructure failure. We must wait for AWS and our vendors to resolve the underlying problem. We are monitoring the situation closely and will send an update as soon as service is restored. Thank you for your patience and understanding, ASD20 Information Technology Team Aside from schools, many businesses that use cloud services for storage and online access have been struggling to gain access. KRDO13 spoke with a technician at Propel Technology, an IT business that serves clients in Colorado Springs and other Colorado areas. "I immediately saw some of my teammates were asking me if I could access some of our privileged access management software, or in the system we used to order Microsoft products, and I was checking all of our software as a service solutions that we use as a part of our company. And increasingly finding that they were inaccessible not only to my teammates, but also to myself," explained Jade Isler, a Propel Technology Technician. She says Propel Technology has been working to find creative workarounds to assist their clients and to complete internal work. "It's been very frustrating for our team, especially as we're still coming in on a Monday and figuring out why some systems weren't working until we had to figure out that it was all caused by an AWS outage. It was a whole lot of banging our heads against the wrong things. Very frustrating. And, it definitely has had an impact on not just our company, but also our clients and many businesses," shared Isler. While Isler says she's seen internet outages before, she says this outage is major. "We're used to internet outages. I would say that the scale of this AWS outage is, as many other things are this year, unprecedented in both its scope and its impact," stated Isler. CNN reports that Mehdi Daoudi, CEO of internet performance monitoring firm Catchpoint, estimates the total financial impact of the AWS service disruption will be in the billions of dollars. We asked about what kind of financial impact this could have on Propel Technology's business and clients. She said she could not estimate a figure, but gave some general figures. "What I can tell you is that the companies we support include players in the aerospace and defense industries, health care, professional services, and firms with high cybersecurity and regulatory requirements. I can tell you that the services offered by Amazon for secure government cloud services are not cheap," explained Isler. Some people have reported issues with flights due to the AWS outage, so KRDO13 reached out to the Colorado Springs Airport. The spokesperson for the airport confirmed to KRDO13 that it is not impacted. The platform that KRDO13 uses to share articles on social media has also been impacted. With the following message appearing when accessed.
