The Hare’s F.A.C.T. checking feature verifies spurious claims from sources across campus, including, but not limited to: The Diamondback, President Pines, DOTS, and worst of all, The Diamondback.

In this edition: Canvas just debuted their exciting new Halloween costume: a broken webpage! Unsurprisingly, plenty of other websites had the same idea. Who is this “AWS” deity, and what sins have we committed to deserve such a terrible, globe-spanning punishment?

The Diamondback
“Canvas — the learning management system used by the University of Maryland — has been down Monday morning due to issues with Amazon Web Services.”

EVALUATION: AN APOCALYPSE FOR STUDENTS?

The end isn’t nigh anymore — it’s here! In a cosmically cruel twist of fate, our digital infrastructure has failed us, sparing The Diamondback to issue characteristically empty updates on our incoming extinction. What injury! What terrible fate! Rest assured, dear readers, there is not a dry eye in The Hare’s newsroom, as we weep for what solace we may find in our final hours of peril.

UMD Division of Information Technology
“We do not yet have an estimated time by which services will be restored, but we are in contact with AWS, and they are working to remedy the situation as quickly as possible. As of now, this outage is expected to continue through the end of the day.”

EVALUATION: SCATTERED APPLAUSE

All may not be lost. According to an impromptu opinion poll of UMD professors, roughly half of the University’s faculty support extending due dates to accommodate outages. The other half responded with notes of disapproval, including “Please see my TA during their office hours” and “What is a ‘Canvas?’”

AWS Health Dashboard
“Our mitigations to resolve launch failures for new EC2 instances continue to progress and we are seeing increased launches of new EC2 instances and decreasing networking connectivity issues in the US-EAST-1 Region. We are also experiencing significant improvements to Lambda invocation errors, especially when creating new execution environments (including for Lambda@Edge invocations).”

EVALUATION: MEANINGLESS GOBBLEDYGOOK

You thought your weekend was unproductive? According to an insider source at a regional Amazon Web Services (AWS) office, located 10 miles below the Earth’s crust, employees’ spirits are high and productivity is at an all-time low. “[Jeff Bezos] used to march around our office with a bullwhip, shouting about workflow efficiencies and scheduling stand-up meetings at 2am. He got married over the summer, and we haven’t seen him since.” In Bezos’ absence, hundreds of server rooms have been converted into racquetball courts, the conference rooms host nightly ragers, and employee satisfaction surveys have reached historical highs. But all good things must come to an end. As AWS technicians rush to dig racquetballs out of the server racks, the software engineers must stall for time, issuing nonsensical public statements constructed via MadLibs.

Image Credits: Kenlynn Ingham