Canvas data breach
-
The online education platform Canvas went offline after a data breach on Thursday, temporarily leaving students and faculty at thousands of U.S. colleges — and K-12 schools — without access to course materials and communications during finals period.
"I'm sure somewhere in the country when the outage happened, there probably were people actually taking final exams on the platform when it crashed," says Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Thirty million users — including at half of the higher education institutions in North America — rely on Canvas to manage courses, submit assignments, view grades and facilitate communication, according to its parent company, Instructure.
But when Linker and many other users tried to do so on Thursday afternoon, they met a black screen and a warning message.
"ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again)," it read. "Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some 'security patches.'
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/08/nx-s1-5815956/canvas-data-breach-school-finals
Paging @piano-dad @nina @shirokuro
-
So Canvas is back online for many schools — but not mine! They are saying they won’t bring it back until they finish some third-party verification that it’s safe.
I mean, that’s certainly the smart thing to do, but everything is in limbo in the meantime. Not only finals, but I’m teaching a summer session class, which starts on Tuesday and it’s all hilt in since Canvas…
-
We finally got Canvas back mid-afternoon yesterday. I used Canvas to calculate my final grades, but I decided to enter grades by hand out of an overabundance of caution (rather than use the automatic grade submission tool that links Canvas to our faculty grade submission portal).
And wouldn't you know, I entered one student's grade incorrectly.
I've already initiated the grade change process and it will be fine because it was my mistake (and fortunately, it's not for a student who's graduating), but of course I had to go through this whole bureaucratic rigamarole to do that...
The ripple effect of this cybersecurity incident... surely but one among many...
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better 💗
Register Login