Mt. SAC students and faculty regained access to their central learning management system Canvas late Monday evening after a widespread outage left the platform offline for more than half a day, coinciding with the first day of the college’s 8-week fall courses.

The abrupt shutdown in services was caused early in the morning due to a technical failure with Amazon Web Services, the cloud provider that hosts Canvas and other major apps and websites across the country. The website remained inaccessible for a majority of the day, preventing students from submitting assignments and accessing their course materials. Professors were also unable to access and post student’s grades.

The outage caused additional disruptions on campus, including check-in systems at essential student support centers such as El Centro, Student Services and other resource programs that rely on logins for attendance and services.

According to Canvas’s company website, access to Canvas was officially declared resolved by 7:02 p.m., but users were advised to expect slower loading times and possible login errors as systems recovered from the surge in traffic.

With the campus operations and classes now slowly returning to normal, students are advised to check in with instructors on Canvas for any updated deadlines or assignments that have been impacted and delayed by the shutdown.