Students experienced problems accessing some New School internet services Thursday during a reported internet service outage that affected a large number of websites throughout the country.
Canvas, the online system The New School uses for students to submit assignments or find their syllabi for classes, was temperamental during the outage, students said. One student also claimed that he had trouble connecting to New School databases.
“Canvas was running very, very slow,” said Gigi Comas of Parsons.
The internet outage occurred when some of Amazon’s East Coast servers went down for about an hour, The Verge reported.
Canvas service suffered when Amazon’s servers went down because the site relies on Amazon’s hardware as a hosting platform, according to Lillian Sartori, New School assistant vice president of information technology services.
Amazon is among the most used web hosting servers out there, according to The Verge. The outage took a handful of other pages down with it including Trello, Quora, IFTTT and Splitwise.
The internet company is currently at work to bring the hardware completely back online, according to its website.
The problem apparently didn’t affect all New School students. Culture and media major Sarah Santos was in the Arnold Hall tech lab from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. and said she experienced no issues with The New School’s online services.
Zen Pietastrud, Parsons photography major, said mynewschool.com worked fine for her, but her own website, zenpiertastrud.com, built on Format.com was having trouble loading.
The New School has confirmed that Canvas is now back in working order.