As a result of an issue with Amazon Web Services, school websites and resources were shut down on Oct. 20. This affected websites including Canvas, AP Classroom and Goodreads. Without the use of these websites, many students were not able to complete work during class time.

Chief Technology Officer Phil Hintz stated that the outage was caused by a Domain Naming Service (DNS) issue that happened on the US East 1 Region, a major data center located in the United States. Hintz and the tech department worked to fix the tech issues caused by this outage.

“When we were made aware of the issues that Amazon Web Services was having, we immediately emailed all our district staff about the outage,” Hintz said. “Then, in some cases, we were able to give direct links to access certain platforms that had redundancies in place.”

Senior Alanna Fernandez, an AP Art student, was unable to access her AP Classroom. The art course was also erased from her Canvas page and from her schedule in Infinite Campus.

“My third period didn’t have [Canvas] for a long time. I just couldn’t see my art class,” Fernandez said.

Senior Spencer Dugan expressed his concerns with the Amazon Web Service outage.

“There’s just been a lot of issues with logging into Canvas and AP Classroom and other websites,” Dugan said. “It’s very inconvenient because I need to use them during the day. There are a lot of assignments that I need to do in AP Classroom.”

In the library, there were also complications, such as Goodreads, a book cataloging website that is used by the librarians.

“We use Goodreads in the library often to look up titles or authors, and for several hours, it was unusable,” librarian Victoria Pietrus said.

The school district sent direct links to platforms like Canvas and Infinite Campus, allowing staff and students to access them quickly without confusion. This ensured efficient navigation and access to important academic websites.

Hintz believes that the community should expect more issues like this from time to time because of the age of technology that we are living in currently.

“Since these services are digital in nature, this is what can happen from time to time in the digital world,” Hintz said. “It’s like we can walk to school as our main mode of transportation, but if we take the bus to school, we rely on the bus to always be working. If the bus breaks down, then we are left with going back to a stable, reliable means of getting to school. Thank goodness this outage was only temporary and we were still able to crack open a book and continue learning.”