Students reported issues accessing the Canvas website, IUs learning management system that students use to access homework assignments and classwork, Monday morning. IU spokesperson Chuck Carney said the issue was caused by a bug within IU’s login process, but University Information Technology Services is still investigating.
“There was a slight adjustment that was made over the summer, and that may have made a difference,” he said.
The adjustment was made in order to prepare for increased traffic on the platform, as more students will be using Canvas this fall than in previous years due to COVID-19 precautions. Carney said those adjustments could have caused Monday’s problem.
A few other services were affected, including Salesforce and Bursar Pay, according to Monday's UITS status page. Some students are also reporting that Kaltura is still having issues, though it is unclear whether or not it’s related to IU’s Canvas issues.
As K-12 schools and major universities across the country, including IU, started classes Monday, Zoom users also experienced issues, according to tweets from Zoom. Carney said the Zoom difficulty was unrelated to the Canvas outage.
Carney saidthe Canvas issue was an isolated problem and that UITS has fixed the problem.
“They feel fairly confident that this has solved the problem,” he said.
Students were able to access Canvas without issue on Tuesday and Wednesday. Carney said there was similar traffic on the site, and it was an isolated issue.
Most students were able to start accessing Canvas by 2 p.m. on Monday, according to Carney. Zoom reported that their issues were solved by 1:10 p.m.
“We appreciate the patience of everybody because this was something we didn’t expect nor want to happen, but it was able to be resolved,” Carney said. “We don’t think it’ll happen again.”
