Canvas Service Degradation

Update timeline

1. investigating Aug 25, 2026, 07:13 PM UTC

   We have received reports that Canvas is currently experiencing issues. The NTS Systems Engineering team is currently investigating, and we will be making updates at 2-hour intervals. Thank you for your patience during the resolution of this issue!

2. identified Aug 25, 2026, 07:58 PM UTC

   NTS Systems Engineering has provided a description of the issues currently recognized: "Some stacked Canvas courses are experiencing an issue. These courses were system generated as individuals or stacks based on the course information in Banner. The course shells in Canvas were then stacked or unstacked by an instructor or admin. The provisioning system that connects Banner data to Canvas ran a full re-provision August 24th to fix a number of enrollment discrepancies across Canvas. This fixed the enrollment issues, however it also undid any manual stack/unstack actions that had happened. For affected courses, instructors will see their courses unpublished, empty, and back to their original configuration. For students it will look like their course disappeared." We are currently recommending instructors pause any modifications to their affected courses, work with the Registrar to arrange the crosslist coding desired in Banner, then launch the course once it generates again in Canvas. Thank you again for your patience as we work towards a full resolution of the issues; we will continue to make updates as new information becomes available and at 2-hour intervals.

3. monitoring Aug 25, 2026, 11:42 PM UTC

   NTS System Engineering identified 378 potentially affected courses. All course materials are recoverable and instructors have a few options moving forward. NTS will work to recover any student submissions that came in before the provisioning. Instructors have 2 options: 1. Work with the system generated Canvas courses - These course shells can be populated with the content from the course from before the August 24th provisioning. Instructors can then publish and continue their courses. 2. Update the crosslist for your course in Banner - Delay your course and work with your department course scheduler to submit a proposal to change the crosslist structure in Banner to match what you want in Canvas. Once the change is complete and the new system generated Canvas course is available, it can be populated with the content from the course from before the August 24th provisioning. IF this is affecting your courses please email [email protected] with the CRNs of the courses and which option you are taking. NTS will only be able to help with restoring content. For instructors choosing option 2, you will need to contact your course scheduler. The Registrar is aware of this incident and is available to help schedulers submit the needed proposals.

4. monitoring Aug 26, 2026, 01:46 AM UTC

   The NTS Systems Engineering team is continuing to restore course content and remedy one-off issues. The two options available to instructors with affected Canvas classes are: 1. Work with the system generated Canvas courses - These course shells can be populated with the content from the course from before the August 24th provisioning. Instructors can then publish and continue their courses. 2. Update the crosslist for your course in Banner - Delay your course and work with your department course scheduler to submit a proposal to change the crosslist structure in Banner to match what you want in Canvas. Once the change is complete and the new system generated Canvas course is available, it can be populated with the content from the course from before the August 24th provisioning. If this is affecting your course(s), please email [email protected] with the CRNs of the courses and which option you would like to proceed with. NTS will only be able to help with restoring content, and can no longer manually cross-list or de-cross-list courses. For instructors choosing option 2, you will need to contact your course scheduler. The Registrar is aware of this incident and is available to help schedulers submit the needed proposals. Thank you again for your time as we work towards a full resolution! This is our final update for the business day, and reporting will begin again at the beginning of the day (8:00am AKDT).

5. monitoring Aug 26, 2026, 04:59 PM UTC

   Thank you for your patience as we work through the recent software issue that caused manually cross‑listed classes in Canvas to disconnect. NTS SE, OIT EAS, and UAF Registrar identified a work-around to allow manual cross-listing in Canvas. This revises previous guidance for instructors on how to proceed. Instructors can now opt to have their Canvas courses match their pre-incident configuration. Instructors are also able to do this reconfiguration themselves using the cross-listing tools in Canvas. If you are still experiencing problems, please submit a ticket to [email protected] and include the CRNs for the affected sections.

6. monitoring Aug 26, 2026, 07:10 PM UTC

   We have identified the configuration issue that caused manually cross‑listed classes in Canvas to disconnect. NTS SE, OIT EAS, and UAF Registrar implemented a fix to allow manual cross-listing in Canvas. We are monitoring the situation. If you are still experiencing problems and have not already submitted a help ticket, please submit a ticket to [email protected] and include the CRNs for the affected sections.

7. resolved Aug 28, 2026, 05:44 PM UTC

   Canvas courses remain able to be cross-listed by Canvas admins and instructors without issue, and we are considering this incident resolved at this time. If you are still experiencing problems or require your course content to be recovered and have not already submitted a help ticket, please do so by emailing [email protected] with a description of your issue/request and include the CRNs for the affected sections. Thank you so much for your patience as this issue was resolved!

8. postmortem Sep 22, 2026, 07:13 PM UTC

   Canvas LMS Degradation of Service Problem Impact Analysis Event Occurrence: 8/25/26 # Background The Canvas LMS platform provides web based digital classroom features to instructors and students. Courses, terms, and enrollments on the platform are managed through a direct connection to UAF’s SIS platform and Registrar processes. For most online courses and some in person courses, the associated Canvas course shell is the centralized location for all coursework, references, and grades. # Break Down of the Problem On 8/21/26 we received canvas support tickets from less than 5 users reporting that their course rosters were missing students or an instructor. Upon investigation, we found the configuration of the Canvas LMS to Banner SIS integration to have a timing issue. The integration, called ILP, does realtime updates of course enrollments when they meet certain criteria. The issue occurred because the enrollments in the course were changing before the course itself met the requirements to be monitored and updated by ILP. The fix for this issue was to reprovision the course. Reprovisioning treats the course information as ‘new’ regardless of if it had already been updated, making the Canvas course info match the Banner SIS course info. This solved the individual reported issues, but we needed to reprovision all of the courses, and continue to reprovision throughout the semester. Based on research in ILP forums, this is the solution for most institutions who encounter this issue. ‌ On 8/24/26 around 3 PM, we reprovisioned all UAF courses using the ‘bulk job’ tool in ILP. We then validated course enrollments from a few new tickets that had come in to ensure the fix had the intended effect. Courses that had been missing enrollments were corrected. ‌ On 8/24/26 at 5 PM we received reports of Canvas courses disappearing from students and instructors. Upon investigation, we found the courses affected were all cross-listed and the instructor had manually changed the system generated configuration by either cross-listing additional courses, or de-cross-listing courses. Instructors are able to do this in the Canvas platform with any courses they are listed as the instructor in. When we reprovisioned, the system changed the configurations of the Canvas courses to match Banner and this undid whatever the instructor had done. ‌ On 8/25/26 9 AM we began a degradation of service outage for Canvas as more Canvas service tickets came in. We communicated with all administrators advising them of the situation and to not cross-list courses in Canvas until we had more information. We posted an announcement to instructors and admins on the Canvas platform about the outage. We removed the permission for instructors in Canvas to be able to cross-list/de-cross-list their courses. We assessed the number of courses potentially impacted, and communicated with the instructors of record for each course. ‌ On 8/25/26 at 12 PM NTS-SE put out guidance to instructors to contact the Registrar if the system generated Canvas courses did not match what the instructor wanted. We discovered that instructors frequently cross-list courses across modalities in Canvas so they can manage all sections for a course in a single course shell. Canvas sections functionality allows them to do this without requiring them to expose cross-listed enrollments to each other. This is an important distinction between Canvas cross-listing and Registrar cross-listing: the term cross-listing/stacking for the Registrar means the enrollments are pooled together and it is expected that the students will be exposed to each other. Registrar policy prohibits cross-listing across modalities. This is a result of Faculty Senate concerns for anonymity in student course evaluations where a student could be identified by the modality of their response. Additional guidance was provided telling instructors to contact the NTS help desk for the recovery of any lost Canvas course content. These solutions did not work for many instructors who rely on the ability to cross-list in Canvas. ‌ On 8/25/26 at 4 PM NTS-SE, Registrar, and OIT-EAS working group met to review and test settings and options in ILP to get instructors out of work stoppage. The group identified a way to do reprovisioning without affecting cross-listed courses. The group identified the existing real-time update process that changes Canvas cross-list configurations. The group tested a fix to allow instructors to manually cross-list in Canvas, and then validated it in our test environment. The fix was to allow instructors to re-cross-list and/or submit NTS help desk tickets to have our teams re-cross-list and restore lost content. All future reprovisions will use a configuration that excludes cross-list information.The fix was communicated in an outage update and through a Canvas LMS platform announcement. The permissions for an instructor to be able to cross-list in Canvas were re-enabled. Administrators were informed that they could now cross-list for instructors. By 12 PM 8/26/26 The outage was moved to monitoring while we worked through tickets. By 9 AM 8/28/26 The outage was resolved. # Target State / Goal This issue changed the target state. Instructors should be able to manually cross-list or de-cross-list their course shells in Canvas, regardless of how the courses are coded in Banner. The cross-listing configuration should NOT be altered or set by the Banner ILP feed, nor should the cross-list status be watched nor updated from real-time monitoring. Active users should experience consistent access to the same Canvas course shell after the initial provisioning by the Banner ILP system except when manually changed by the instructor, or by an administrator.