Copyright ABC17News.com
COLUMBIA Mo. (KMIZ) The University of Missouri System works is working to restore system services for students as operations to the school's class management program Canvas remains unavailable after the massive Amazon Web Services cloud services outage Monday morning. The outage, which began at around 3 a.m. was resolved by 3:40 p.m., according to national reporting. Experts estimated that the outage resulted in billions of dollars lost in missed work, delayed flights and locked accounts. "I went to my French class and she (the instructor) was grading our midterm videos, but she said she had to stop around seven in the morning because Canva shut down," MU student Beatrice Gottschalk said. "We were going to play them in class and comment on the videos and write down notes about each other, we couldn't do that." MU spokesman Christopher Ave said in a statement that the school is aware of the issues. "We are engaging with various stakeholders to work through the outage until services are restored," Ave said. In an email ABC 17 News obtained from a University of Missouri student, at 4:48 p.m., the UM Academic Technology department announced to students and faculty that Canvas was still facing service outages with no ETA for a resolution. MU Professor and Director of the Cyber Education Research and Infrastructure Center Prasad Calyam reassured that no data was leaked, however, the outage did show potential holes in data storage strategies for major companies like Google, Venmo and Canvas. Calyam compared Amazon Web Services to a storage unit, with the outage virtually "loosing the keys" to each company's data storage locker, leaving websites in limbo. "We access a lot of data and the system that actually helps us access the data basically went down, so we were asking for data and we were not getting any data," Calyam said. Calyam added companies are often advised to keep data in seperate locations to prevent this issue from happening. "For those people who are building these services with Amazon, it's a warning to kind of diversify their cloud strategy," Calyam said. "Build a system that is not dependent on one source." Calyam also advises users to store important documents or files on hard drives to keep a hard copy available in case of future crashes.
