Starting shortly after 3 a.m. on Monday, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage, taking websites and apps that use its cloud computing platforms offline around the world. Approximately two hours later, Amazon announced that most websites and apps using AWS were working normally again, though instability persisted on many sites.

In an email to the campus community at 9:49 a.m. on Monday, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer Michael Cato shared that the AWS outage caused difficulties in the restoration of functions across systems utilized by the College.

“We are experiencing instability with Canvas, CampusGroups and several systems that the College relies on that also use AWS,” Cato wrote. “We expect these systems will stabilize through the day, and I apologize for the inconvenience this may cause.”

Bowdoin StatusHub noted additional disruptions to Panopto, Qualtrics, Confluence and JamfPro.

For most of Monday, students and faculty were unable to use any of the aforementioned sites, affecting many classes, especially through the Canvas outage. Ari Faulkner ’28, who was scheduled to take an exam in a class on Monday, described how the format of his midterm had to be readjusted.

“We were set to take a lockdown browser exam…, a pilot program that Bowdoin IT is working on to conduct exams using laptops online where you can’t look things up or refer to notes, rather than [using] blue books,” Faulkner said. “Of course, that was the day of the crash…. The professor emailed us beforehand and said, ‘Sorry, it’s not going to work, and we’re going to have to use blue books.’”

At 8:46 a.m. on Tuesday morning, Bowdoin StatusHub announced the resolution of all AWS-related disruptions to services.