Canvas cyberattack causes outage for millions of users
Canvas cyberattack impacts millions of students nationwide
Canvas experienced a major outage on Thursday due to an apparent cyberattack, impacting millions of students and educators during a crucial week of the school year.
Cavas, the widely used service for school and university assignments, experienced a nationwide outage Thursday due to a cyberattack.
What we know:
Thousands of users reported noticeable disruptions with the learning management system around 12:30 p.m. PT, according to DownDetector. The outage lasted throughout most of the day.
The University of Washington IT confirmed the disruption is due to an "apparent security incident" that made the platform fully inaccessible to all users.
At around 8:15 PT, Instructure stated in an update that Canvas was now available for most users. Canvas Beta and Canvas Test were still undergoing maintenance.
Many people online posted a picture of a message that appears when users try to log into Canvas, a warning from the hacking group ShinyHunters threatening a data leak.
"ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some 'security patches,'" it read. The message said all data will be leaked by May 12 if a settlement is not reached.
Canvas cyberattack message (via Reddit user @lakerdave)
Canvas, owned by Instructure, provides online courses, assignments, grading, and education tools used by schools and colleges across the country. The outage is leaving thousands of students and educators unable to access its services during a critical period of the school year, as many are finishing finals and midterms.
Instructure had previously resolved a confirmed "cybersecurity incident" on Wednesday, where hackers acquired names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages in a breach. The company claimed to have contained the incident at 2:15 p.m., and that no passwords, dates of birth, government IDs, or financial information were leaked.
The University of Washington and Bellevue School District said no sensitive student information was involved in the incident.
What we don't know:
Instructure is still investigating the issue and has not yet confirmed if the outage is a result of a cyberattack. The public can check the current status of Canvas and other services on Instructure's website.
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The Source: Information in this story came from DownDetector, Instructure, the University of Washington, and FOX 13 Seattle reporting.