The AWS outage happened on Oct. 20, starting around 3 am and resolving by 6 pm. The shut down was caused by a small bug that spiraled into a huge problem that broke the internet. Many websites and apps were affected such as Snapchat, Reddit, Hulu, HBO Max, Fortnite and Roblox. These apps are used by millions around the world. Many schools like Gulliver were also affected by the shutdown. Some school-related apps that were affected were MyBooks, IXL, Veracross, and Walsworth.
“As soon as I got to school, nobody could login to MyBooks,” math teacher Margot Reges said. “So, that day we had an assignment that we were supposed to be doing in class that was all on Aleks and all of MyBooks were shut down, so I had to completely change everything that we were doing for that day into something new.”
Many teachers had to change their plan of action for the day and were stuck and having trouble on having to grade assignments. Because the teachers didn’t get everything they wanted to get done, many students felt they had much more homework to do.
“Veracross didn’t work, and so it kinda stopped us from doing our work and there was like a lot of things that we couldn’t get done so it caused more homework for us,” Oceana Bain (8) said.
Many teachers had to completely change their lesson plan for the day and caused them to fall behind which made them assign more homework than they usually did. It was not only the students that had more homework, teachers had to pause their grading due to the shut down. Some teachers felt overwhelmed by the grading they needed to complete in order to stay in pace. A few teachers are taking online courses and had to pause the course because of the outage.
“I couldn’t grade all of my IXL’s because the IXL website was down and also the Harvard course I was taking, it wasn’t working so I couldn’t do either of those things,” social studies teacher Leslie Gamble said.
With all things considered, the AWS outage stopped multiple students, teachers, and many more, causing much confusion. Now that the outage is resolved, people can go back to school knowing all apps are fixed and working.
