Comment by Gabriel54
9 hours ago
I'm surprised how few comments there are on this thread. This is probably affecting millions of students at the most stressful time of the year.
Incidentally I've always hated Canvas and probably every other LMS provider, but what is particularly amusing about this current outage is that it is occurring at exactly the time when universities are demanding that all professors put all of their materials on Canvas, without exception, due to ADA compliance regulations. It is explicitly forbidden for professors to, e.g., refer to pdfs posted on a personal website.
Other commentators here seem not to understand that many faculty also do not enjoy being forced to use Canvas.
I'm in Europe, and we don't use Canvas (at least, I've never heard of it). However, we have similar diseases. In my particular school, it's a massive SharePoint site plus ever more stuff in Teams. Plus Moodle, plus other services.
The MS services have not improved teaching at all. What they do, is fragment communications, and add ever more places people have to look, in hopes of finding things.
But the administration loves them. "The bureaucracy is expanding, to meet the expanding needs of the bureaucracy."
They have not succeeded in forcing me, yet. But it's sad how many computing faculty apparently can't operate the basic online infrastructure needed to support their courses. Not that universities make it easy for us.
And of course the other serious concern I have with Canvas is that they are likely using all the materials faculty upload to train their AI replacements. Many of my colleagues engage in dark humor about this but I haven't noticed much action.
> they are likely using all the materials faculty upload to train their AI replacements
Instructure (Canvas's developer) partnered with OpenAI last year [1], about a year after KKR and Dragoneer (PE firms) acquired it [2].
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rayravaglia/2025/07/23/instruct...
[2] https://www.pehub.com/kkr-and-dragoneer-complete-4-8bn-take-...
instructure/canvas-lms is open-source -- is there anything preventing universities from hosting it themselves?
Money, skill, liability.
That calculus is about to shift.
I'm sure the engineers at instructure are not capable of building systems that can do that. You give them too much credit.
Former Instructure engineer here. Ive been gone almost 10 years at this point, but some of the best engineers I've ever worked with were at INST.
I'm not sure where your stereotype even comes from, because Canvas is not trivial software. You can see for yourself as it's AGPL and I assume you looked at the code before criticizing it because any good engineer would do that.
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If they're at the level you say, they just might install some AI gizmo like the Vercel employee was accused of, but really let it run amok with write permissions.
Live streaming of class through Canvas is very popular. Quite a few people just watch from their dorms. So maybe people will have to come back to class, that will be entertaining. The class rooms are almost standing room only (sometimes they are) on the first day of class and then gradually thin out. Sometimes 10 or so people show up out of a class of 100. If Canvas is not back up soon I think it could actually be disruptive for that reason also.
This is awful to hear. The idea that students are just half assedly streaming the lectures is really just ruining things in the long run. This is a bit old manny, but showing up to lectures is good. You go to class, you get face time with professors, you can ask impromptu questions, you rub elbows with classmates, you talk on the walk between classes, you maybe run into a cute girl. Friction like walking to class and finding a nook in that annoying hour gap you have, are the things that make life enjoyable.
Not much overlap between students and HN these days, though? I’m an extremely rare outlier afaik :)
The administration has so far opened with one “Canvas said” and then an hour later one “Canvas is down indefinitely” email noting that they’re aware it’s serious.
(Canvas is a glorified wiki for teaching students, with quizzes and such, for those unaware.)
> Not much overlap between students and HN these days, though?
That's my biggest fear.
I'm an undergrad student in computer science and I come here regularly. Many of my friends do the same. Of course, that can't be extrapolated to students globally, but students who love what they do are not extinct!
FWIW, I'm a student, so there are at least a few still here. Feel free to ask me any questions (either via email or via replies to this post) and I'll try to answer them.
Is there any internal data on where students are going instead?
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Drop me an email if you like — it’s not really topical to Canvas but I’m happy to discuss further.
(Comments were split across multiple threads and we've since merged them.)
Definitely not a criticism of your (hard) work here. Thank you!
Thanks! I just added that bit to pre-empt confusion - context-switches like this are one of those rug-pulling moments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48041875).
We all appreciate the work you do! Thank you!
Can you explain for the billions of the rest of us why this is the "most stressful time of the year" for the group you're referencing? I assume that's American students and/or teachers?
Final exam season, and it's ongoing in Iceland too, so not just American students.
Replace your material content with lorem ipsum or garbage LLM content and upload it to Canvas to test the accessibility of your documents if required.
What? What makes Canvas accessible in a way that HTML and PDF files are not? It's true that PDF readers aren't the best for screenreaders, but surely you can just upload a .html copy as well.
Canvas has an easy way of checking if a pdf or other course material is accessible, so many universities are forcing faculty to put all their materials on Canvas. That way if a pdf or powerpoint is not compliant it is immediately flagged. The goal is to reach a "100% accessible" metric.
Note that little of this really helps the students that it is supposed to help, because as you wisely point out, raw HTML is almost by definition extremely accessible. I work in a field that uses Latex and the source code of Latex should also be considered more accessible than the compiled pdf. But for university administrators the only important thing is that the accessibility metric that appears (or used to appear, before today!) on Canvas shows 100% accessible.
That really sucks. I'm visually impaired and many members of my family are/were blind. I think accessibility is really important, but it's so painful to me to feel like people's limited energy is being directed towards performative measures, useless rituals, vanity metrics, etc.
Nobody has infinite energy, and disabled people don't have infinite social capital. It's a shame when energy from that shared pool gets spent on things that don't really impact meeting people's access needs.
And the other thing is that everyone's access needs are different. It can certainly be useful to try to set a baseline or propagate common guidance. But the most important thing, especially in a university setting, is for instructors to be flexible and responsive and for classes (and non-teaching workloads) to be structured in a way (e.g., small enough) that supports that.
I think metrics like "100% accessible" might even be dangerous. It makes it easy for able-bodied people who aren't in direct contact with disabled stakeholders to pat themselves on the back without actually knowing what's going on.
Bleh. Good luck doing right by your disabled students and disabled colleagues, and good luck resisting the bullshit.
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Are you saying that making sure your courses are fully accessible to your students by following disability regulations is a bad thing?
Putting aside the "So you hate waffles?" non-sequitur, surely the entire topic of this thread should be a bit of a hint that this misguided policy has not, in fact, "[made sure] courses are fully accessible".
Well, to be fair, it has made every course hosted on Canvas equally accessible to everyone. ;)
Not GP, Incompetent policy makers are the bad thing.
Accessibility regulations, implemented with feedback from faculty and with the support of university resources, are certainly a good thing. But that is not what is happening in my experience.