Canvas down amid national cybersecurity threats to Instructure | News
Canvas down amid national cybersecurity threats to Instructure | News
Publish Date: 2026-05-07 18:45:00
Source Domain: dailytitan.com
This is a developing story and will be continuously updated.
Canvas is currently experiencing a cybersecurity breach involving the learning management system’s vendor Instructure, leading to the website and application being shut down for maintenance.
A message from ShinyHunters, a cyber extortion group, appeared for college campuses across the nation. The group, known for hacking educational organizations on a mass scale, claims responsibility for the data breach.
A message on their website reads: “It’s very simple. When you pay us, your data is deleted, and you move on with your life. When you don’t pay us, you get posted here, among other things.”
As of 3:15 p.m., ShinyHunters has removed Instructure from the homepage of their website.
This follows a campus-wide announcement made yesterday by the division of Information Technology sharing the initial incident. As of 11 a.m. Wednesday, when the message was sent, Canvas was still fully operational.
“We have been informed that the threat actor accessed data from many educational institutions worldwide stored at Instructure’s site that likely included information from the CSU,” the statement reads.
IT released a campus-wide announcement via email today at 2:18 p.m.
“We have been informed that the threat actor has escalated their attack on Instructure. Canvas has been taken offline at all campuses while they deal with the threat” the announcement reads.
Instructure has yet to confirm exactly which data is exposed. However, it states personal information like names, email addresses, campus ID numbers and messages based on a preliminary assessment as accessible sources of information.
This comes after an initial pause in Canvas’ accessibility and function for about an hour on Monday, May 4.
The Canvas website showed a page citing a “scheduled maintenance” with…
