Nationwide cybersecurity attack leaves students across the country without access to Canvas
Nationwide cybersecurity attack leaves students across the country without access to Canvas
Publish Date: 2026-05-07 23:13:00
Source Domain: www.wbir.com
Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points. Canvas, the learning platform, has shut down nationwide due to a cybersecurity incident that has affected educational institutions across the country.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — A cybersecurity incident with the Canvas learning platform vendor may have caused some users to see an unauthorized message after logging in.
Knox County Schools said its technology department is working with Instructure, the Canvas vendor, and has already deleted the message. KCS said it wasn’t the only school district affected.
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“We’re probably in the same position waiting as a lot of institutions of higher ed and other school systems are waiting at this point,” Jon Rysewyk, KCS Superintendent, said. “We’ve done everything we can on our end to be as secure as possible, so now we just kind of wait and see what our vendor will do.”
Instructure, the company that runs the Canvas learning management system used by more than 7,000 universities, K-12 districts and education ministries worldwide, disclosed the breach to affected institutions this week. The company confirmed names, email addresses, student ID numbers and private messages between users had been accessed before the breach was contained.
The criminal extortion group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the attack. On a dark web leak site, the group alleged it had stolen more than 3.65 terabytes of data and threatened to release it unless its demands were met. The group said it stole roughly 275 million records tied to students, teachers and staff, and shared a list of 8,809 school districts, universities and online education platforms it claims were affected.
The University of Tennessee said in a statement they do not know when Canvas services will be restored, but Instructure posted a status page to share updates on the outage.
The University of Tennessee sent out the following statement.
Related to this incident, Instructure has notified the Office of Innovative Technologies (OIT) of a data breach associated with some accounts. Based on what Instructure has found to date, the data involved appears to include personal information. At this time, Instructure has found no indication that passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers, or financial information were involved, and the university does not store this information in Canvas.
All faculty are urged to be flexible and compassionate with students during the Canvas outage, especially as we are entering exams. Please communicate with your students, reassure them, and keep them aware of any changes for your class.
Before the University sent out a statement, students were worried about upcoming finals and assignments they had lost access to since the platform was down.
“I was trying to access a practice test because I have a really big final tomorrow and it was completely inaccessible,” UT student Abby Doyle, said. “I don’t think there could be a worse time for this to be shut down than on study day.”
Her friend Ellie Rittenhouse shared the same concerns.
“I have a really big paper that’s due tonight, and then I have an exam that’s on Tuesday that I both really need Canvas to work for,” Rittenhouse said. “It’s just kind of just really annoying because it’s happened before but not like during finals.”
Other students at UT were worried about due dates they could no longer see.
“Today was supposed to be our study day before our finals start,” Gabrielle Ramirez said. “With the app being down, we can’t get to study material.”
“I have a lot of papers and presentations that I need to submit and turn in, and right now I can’t even see the exact due date,” Gabrielle Snyder said.
A few hours after the Canvas shutdown, the University let students know all Friday exams are postponed, and faculty, staff and students will receive more information on Friday on a revised schedule. They said the Office of Innovative Technologies is continuing to monitor the disruption.
Infrastructure, Canvas’ parent company, shut down Canvas nationwide due to a cybersecurity incident that has affected education institutions across the country. Learn more about the Canvas outage.
UT student Ava Baer said her professor sent her class an email acknowledging the outage.
“My professor sent a mass email with a link to a Google Drive that has like past exams and our equation sheets,” Baer said. “It’s a physics exam which we’re all stressed about, so it was nice of him.”
The University said OIT will reach out if you need to take any action, and to be on the lookout for fishy emails and follow OIT’s online instructions to learn how to spot a scam and report it to OIT.
Access MyUTK, UT Microsoft 365, UT Google, Canvas, and other university websites directly. Avoid opening links and attachments from unknown senders. Do not open attachments unless you are expecting a file from someone.
