Is Canvas down right now?

Yes. HostTracker lets you add any URL - including third-party services you depend on, not just your own website - as a monitored target, and notifies you automatically the moment it becomes unreachable. Before sending an alert, HostTracker re-verifies a failure from multiple locations in its 300+-location network, so you're notified about real, confirmed outages rather than a single location's momentary blip. The free plan checks two monitors every 30 minutes indefinitely at no cost; paid plans check as often as once a minute, with alerts available through SMS, email, voice call, and several messenger apps.

Document it immediately, because evidence matters more than explanation afterwards. Take a timestamped screenshot of the error, note the exact time, and keep the finished work saved locally. Then email the submission to your instructor from your student address - a timestamped email sent before the deadline is the strongest record you can create that the work was ready on time. Most institutions have a stated policy for platform outages, and instructors are generally accommodating when the failure is verifiable. An independent reachability check adds an impartial third-party record that the service was unreachable at that moment.

Usually just at your school - this is the most important thing to establish, and the easiest to get wrong. Each institution runs its own Canvas instance on its own subdomain with its own sign-on and integrations, so the common failure is local: your university's instance, its identity provider or a specific integration, rather than the platform. If classmates are unaffected, the problem is your account or device; if the whole institution is out but Canvas elsewhere is fine, it is an instance-level incident for your IT team. Testing your institution's own Canvas address from outside your campus network settles it.