It’s been a rough day for Canva. We’ve had hundreds of people come to us saying they can’t upload or open a file. If you are one of those trying to make a quick turnaround and are seeing ‘unable to upload ‘image.png” or ‘image not found’, you’re in good company.
The trouble started to mount on the trackers at 1:48 PM on Thursday. As I write this, Downdetector is up to 122 reports and climbing. They have it down that 76% of the noise is coming from the website, with the app at 23 per cent and logins at 1 per cent.
From what we are hearing, uploads just stop, designs won’t load and the page will lock up on you. It doesn’t matter if it is an image, video or something else; deliverables are being put on hold and social media plans are off. And for some, the error message is there no matter how many times you try on a different tab or device.
Impact on users and businesses
With a user base of 150 million and more, even a little bit of hiccups from Canva can be felt. You have a lot of people in India and elsewhere churning out client decks, ad work, and the like. A short period of unavailability is enough to put a campaign behind schedule.
For the small business or the solo creator, this comes at the worst time of the day. An agency with a few brand calendars to mind is even more in the lurch as backlogs build up before you can get an approval or post.
Canva’s response and current status
You can see on the official status page that Canva has put out some updates on the situation. They put a stamp of ‘resolved’ on it at 16:44 AEST. But they have put in a word of warning: if you are in Australia or New Zealand, things may be a tad slow for a while yet.
They have been through the motions of it. First they said at 10:47 AEST they had a handle on it and were on to a fix. Then at 11:54 they were in monitoring mode, only to go back to ‘identified’ at 12:21 to put out another patch. By 14:19 they were back to watching the numbers.
That kind of back and forth is a sign of a fault that won’t go away easily. There is no technical readout from them, and you don’t usually get one from a platform of this size.
Where the problems showed up
Most of the chatter is about uploads that won’t go through or projects that are a no-go. Add in a video or an asset and you are met with a wall. Some have also had to deal with a sluggish site while in the middle of editing.
If you look at the Downdetector figures, the website is where the rub is. At 76%, it was the desktop browser teams that had to take the hit.
Why uploads failed today
Usually when this happens it is a server on the backend, a CDN issue or an update that didn’t play nice with file handling. Canva hasn’t given us the nitty-gritty. The result for you is the same: your upload is blocked and the site is unresponsive for a time.
They have also made a point of it for our friends in Australia and New Zealand, where you may find some residual slowness even with the fix in place.
What to do if Canva still misbehaves
Still having trouble? Here is a way to clear some of it up:
– Put in a refresh or a restart once you have your work saved
– Wipe the cache or use a different browser
<p data-id=”22)- See if there is anything new on the status page
<p data-id=”23)- Move to a different network in case the Wi-Fi is the problem
– Give it some time for the fix to do its thing
When you are on a clock, you can always make a move to something like Adobe Express, Figma or Microsoft Designer to get by. If you are running a paid campaign or have a client to answer to, it doesn’t hurt to have your drafts in more than one place.
Watch the status page for now. Even after they say all is well, you can have some left over issues. If you are getting the ‘image not found’ type of error, a fresh start with the cache and a change of network will usually do the trick once the backend is in order.
In the end, it is a matter of strategy. A tool that is so central to so many micro-businesses and classrooms has a way of making itself known when it stumbles. Today is a good reminder to have a plan B and know your way around other software, especially when you are in a hurry to put content out the door.
