FILE - The Amazon logo is pictured at the Amazon Robotic Sorting Fulfillment Center in Madison County, Miss., Aug. 11, 2022. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)

Unlike business as usual, the Amazon Web Service cloud outage disrupted the lives of many area residents Monday morning as they were unable to access a wide range of online platforms including Canvas, Venmo and SnapChat.

“Anyone who depends on those resources will have a problem,” said David Barnes, Penn State Altoona teaching professor of Information Sciences and Technology.

Website Downdetector received over 11 million user reports of problems at more than 2,500 companies, according to an Associated Press report.

According to the Amazon Web Service Health Dashboard, disruptions began at 12:11 a.m. Pacific Time on Oct. 20. Throughout the day, Amazon updated the public on steps being taken to resolve the issue.

As of Monday night, the issue has been considered “resolved” by the dashboard.

Looking at the limited information Amazon provided to the public Monday evening, Barnes said the company misdiagnosed the problem when it first began.

Using an example, Barnes said the connection issue is like a highway with six lanes, saying that “instead of traffic spread across six lanes, it puts them all in one lane, and that’s too much traffic and nothing moves.”

Amazon has to “fix the problem so that it’s spread across the wire,” he added.

Many institutions such as colleges and school districts could not access heavily-relied upon applications such as Canvas, which is a popular library media center designed for teachers and students.

According to Barnes, Penn State Altoona uses Canvas for their classroom content.

Students couldn’t access their assignments, so they were affected, he said, yet he was able to bypass Canvas by using different resources such as Microsoft Cloud.

Being in the Information Sciences and Technology department, Barnes was prepared, “but someone who doesn’t have that skill set can’t give exams” during an internet crash, he said.

Moving forward, he said people can prepare for future outages by having backup systems in place such as alternative clouds.

“We’re learning that even though you have systems in place to move from one cloud to another, it doesn’t work the way you expect them to,” he said.

Monday’s situation “makes it obvious how dependent we are for these things,” he said.

Mirror Staff Writer Colette Costlow is at 814-946-7414.