Breaking: Students, Faculty Affected by Canvas Outage Linked to Cyberattack

This afternoon, Marc Malone, executive vice president of Academics (EVPA), notified the Butler CC campus that Canvas began to experience outages. He along with Christina Byram, vice president of Digital Transformation, explained that Education Technology (EdTech) are monitoring the situation and will notify the campus community when Canvas has resumed to normal.

Canvas LMSis used by thousands of schools and universities worldwide. According to reports, the hacker group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for breaching systems connected to Canvas’ parent company, Instructure, according to a New York Times article.

As such, students and faculty at many universities have temporarily lost access to Canvas during this outage.  Hackers allegedly accessed sensitive user information such as names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages exchanged through the platform.  ShinyHunters threatened to leak stolen data unless affected institutions negotiated with them by a stated deadline.

Instructure have placed Canvas and related services into maintenance mode while investigating the breach and restoring systems.