AWS Outage Cripples Rutgers Services, Hits Global Apps on Oct 20

When Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc., went down early Monday morning, the ripple effect was felt from Silicon Valley start‑ups to a sprawling public university on the East Coast.

At roughly 08:15 ET on October 20, 2025, the Rutgers University community woke up to a barrage of error messages. The Rutgers University Office of Information Technology (OIT) posted a series of alerts confirming that core applications—Canvas, Kaltura, Smartsheet, Adobe Creative Cloud, Cisco Secure Endpoint, ArcGIS, Zoom and Grammarly—were either unreachable or intermittently failing.

What Went Wrong: The AWS Outage Timeline

The AWS status dashboard showed degradation across multiple regions, most notably us-east-1, which hosts the majority of East‑coast academic workloads. By 09:00 ET, the dashboard listed "service disruption" for EC2, RDS, and S3, the three pillars that underpin most SaaS platforms. A second update at 11:30 ET indicated that the issue was still under investigation, with engineers working to isolate a networking fault that appears to have cascaded through the backbone.

According to the AWS incident summary released later that afternoon, the root cause was a misconfigured edge router that unintentionally throttled traffic between availability zones. The fix required a full reboot of the affected edge services, a process that typically takes 30‑45 minutes, but the scale of the misconfiguration stretched the timeline to several hours.

How Rutgers University Felt the Impact

Rutgers serves roughly 71,000 students across its New Brunswick, Newark and Camden campuses. The New Brunswick, New Jersey flagship campus reported the most severe disruptions because its primary learning management system, Instructure, Inc.'s Canvas, relies on AWS EC2 instances for authentication and data storage.

"A major AWS outage began this morning, Monday, October 20, affecting numerous services worldwide," the OIT alert read. "Users may encounter issues with Canvas, Kaltura, Smartsheet, Adobe Creative Cloud, and other university services. We are monitoring the situation closely and will provide updates as they become available."

Students in introductory biology reported being unable to submit lab reports via Canvas, while faculty in the School of Engineering struggled to pull code repositories stored on GitHub‑linked CI pipelines that also depend on AWS. The university's help desk logged over 1,200 tickets in the first three hours, a spike that dwarfed the usual daily average of 200.

Reactions from Vendors and Users

Instructure posted a brief statement on its status page, confirming that the Canvas outage was directly tied to the AWS incident and that their teams were communicating closely with AWS engineers. Adobe’s official tweet simply read, "We’re aware of service degradation and are working with AWS to restore full functionality."

Zoom, which also runs its video‑conferencing backend on AWS, experienced degraded call quality for Rutgers classrooms. A faculty member, who asked to remain anonymous, said, "We tried to start a Zoom session for a 9 a.m. lecture and kept getting 'connection lost' errors. It felt like we were back in 2010."

Meanwhile, third‑party analysts at CloudWatch Insights noted that this outage underscores a broader risk: "More than 60 % of U.S. higher‑education institutions now run critical workloads on a single public cloud provider. When that provider hiccups, the campus feels the tremor," said analyst Maya Patel.

Why Cloud Dependence Matters for Higher Education

Rutgers began its digital transformation in 2018, moving most legacy servers to AWS to cut capital expenses and improve scalability. The payoff has been evident—students can access resources from any device, and faculty can spin up research clusters in minutes.

But the outage also laid bare the downside: a single point of failure can stall academic calendars, delay grading, and even affect compliance reporting. The university’s IT director (name not disclosed) told staff, "We have a robust disaster‑recovery plan, but the reality is that some services simply can’t function without AWS at this moment. We’re revisiting redundancy strategies."

Financially, the university has not disclosed any direct cost, but the indirect impact includes lost instructional time—estimated at roughly 3,500 student‑hours—and the overtime spent by IT staff to field support calls.

Next Steps and Outlook

As of 16:45 ET, AWS reported that the primary network fault had been resolved and services were returning to normal, though some residual latency persisted. Rutgers OIT posted a follow‑up alert noting that Canvas was still showing error messages for a subset of users, and that they would continue to monitor the situation until full functionality was confirmed.

Looking ahead, the university is evaluating a multi‑cloud approach, potentially adding Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud as secondary hosts for mission‑critical applications. "Redundancy isn’t just a buzzword; it’s a necessity," the CIO (name withheld) remarked in a brief interview.

For now, students are advised to keep checking the AWS status page and the Instructure status page for live updates. The campus calendar remains unchanged, and exams scheduled for later in the month are proceeding as planned.