Canvas hack strands students during finals, universities postpone exams
Hackers replaced Canvas login pages with a ransom message Thursday, locking students out of grades, study materials and quizzes during finals week. Multiple universities paused or postponed finals and temporarily blocked access to course content while administrators worked to restore systems. The breach also exposed records from 44 Dutch universities and schools, compromising student and institutional data. The outage threatens students' ability to finish assessments on schedule, raises privacy and graduation risks, and highlights the security danger of relying on centralized third-party learning platforms.
Idk if y’all are following the Canvas hack story, but apparently whoever hacked it is holding each uni’s access to canvas for ransom. Grades are due for graduation and no one can log on. 😬
Whorfin120Gee maybe letting for-profit tech firms take over every function in universities was a bad idea?
Jen Mercieca88Props to the hackers for kairos. 😬
Dan Lawson 55I can give an A to each of my students if that helps
We do not stan35Worst part is this isn't the first time Shiny Hunters has hacked the company. They never properly fixed the backdoor, allegedly.
Phil Garnock-Jones25I recommend getting a big *sheet* of paper, *spreading* it out on a table, and writing the names and grades on it with a pencil. Presumably the papers are graded, so the information is available.
There was a time before Canvas and Blackboard. Things worked pretty well I think I'm headed back to that world.
camerontalley.bsky.social13Remember when canvas was self hosted by each school so this couldn’t happen? I member.
Bruce Herbert12Ok, there is more. bsky.app/profile/jord...
Bruce Herbert11Ok, here is another one. bsky.app/profile/nick...
Ginger Snap and Cam 🖖9i am as concerned as hackers releasing Canvas messages, which could include sensitive/private communications about all manner of things.
Bruce Herbert7Bluesky is on it. Some responses on Bluesky. bsky.app/profile/amos...
Emanuel Brown7Not just the Unis. My middle schooler’s district is cooked. Or is that chopped? Can’t keep it straight. No one can get their work or grades. Total shitshow. Also, the Canvas UX is hostility.
Matthew Boedy6Schools starting to release statements this afternoon. Could be thousands
Talos_XLIV5Yes, I saw reports hitting here earlier today sometime around noon-ish. I had an opportunity at the start of 2026 to have/use Canvas on my laptop for distance learning and said, "No thanks. Pass." Our interconnectedness is truly a double-edged sword and I, for one, have grown quite wary of it.
Middle Manager Mom ☕️5Yup. My son is a senior in the middle of midterms. 🫠
Marie Francois3The two schools I teach at in California have come back online. One CSU csme back first, and one CCI. I wonder if the negotiations were at the system level
Lacey (she/her)3It’s almost like having a backup externally is a good precaution
Cody Harrison3this afternoon I got the message from shinyhunters yeah, I wonder how many people saw that and not the schools "scheduled maintenance" page
I’m BLACK & I’m proud-say it loud…2I thought ppl were talking about the website where you make t-shirts.😂 This is bad. I wonder who did it.
Meredith Slota2Is the ransom cancelling student loan debt? If so, I’m into it.
Emmytation2whaaaaaat is that why it was fucked up yesterday I thought my university had rolled out the new login procedure early and gummed up the works I KNEW Canvas was screwy!
Today is a good day to pitch your local outlet something about the canvas hack. Put TIMELY in the subject line. Describe yourself as an educator in a few lines (two sentence!). Then make an argument.
David M. Perry322My arguments are: the people who made this happen our administrators and Tech CEOs, none of whom are going to suffer as a result of the vulnerability they created. Universities should go back to serving humans.
alana (screaming forever)24Us students too! This week was finals and we spent all day yesterday stressing over whether or not we'd be able to take our final today and get our projects submitted. Thankfully it was back up by this morning (just finished) but JFC that's not good stress to deal with.
David M. Perry13Ahem. If this interests you, you’ll like the public scholar bsky.app/profile/loll...
Jesse Berney8My daughter (in high school) was just complaining about this this morning!
Amy Ruffo5I mean isn’t this squarely the responsibility of the tech industry—the CEO/CISO of Instructure?
Matthew Nadler4Also, this the kind of story that goes beyond Canvas, since there are dozens of companies that provide the same service.
Victoria Livingstone4Totally agree! I stopped teaching in 2024 (I now write and edit full-time). If I were still in the classroom, I'd be pitching this today.
biohAZYRd4THATS WHY CANVAS IS DOWN????? Fuck I thought it was just maintenance. I just got an email from my school saying it'd be offline until the 13th - and I have projects to do that I can't see because it's down U g H
Craig Johnson4just did this! thanks for the suggestion
Steven Teasdale2The simplest way, I think, is for administrators to allow instructors to opt-out of any educational software platform if they choose, and ignore any complaints about it.
Erik Vorhes2As a former aspiring educator and current tech worker, I have … thoughts. I’ll probably just blog it, though your skeet is motivating!
Thousands of schools around the US were paralyzed on Thursday after education tech firm Instructure shut down access to its Canvas platform following a breach by hackers going by the name ShinyHunters. www.wired.com/story/canvas...
Dave Paoletti9Going after academics and students?! C’mon, man. As if this field isn’t plagued by enough problems. ShinyHunters need to watch Robin Hood again or something and rethink their strategy.
Todd Austin8Instructure shut down access? The splash screen we all got with the ransom demand made it pretty clear that it was the hackers who shut Instructure down.
If hackers started releasing government secrets like the Epstein files they'd be heroes. Instead they mess with school kids.
The Canvas hack is truly terrifying and could have all kinds of knock-on effects. Student messages to professors can be particularly sensitive. @linkletter.org helps contextualize this: www.404media.co/the-biggest-...
drewtoothpaste8my kid uses Canvas in school, it's clunky at the best of times and is notoriously frustrating for students, parents and teachers. we weren't notified of this at all until yesterday, when the school district emailed about the breach. canvas itself told the end users nothing!
Niema Moshiri7It should be noted that, at my university at least, instructors were explicitly pressured to migrate their course infrastructures to Canvas (rather than e.g. separately maintained course websites) 🤷♂️
msdobalina.bsky.social4Worth recalling that neither students nor faculty wanted these systems.
If the end of the semester Canvas hack has taught us anything, it's that universities need to double down on giving everything to borderline monopoly tech run by megalomaniac private equity dbags.
Keith Ng10Goodbye 40% of budget going to Canvas! Hello 35% of budget going to Canvas and 25% of budget going to Canvas Premium Protection Support!
Jackalope Proxy8Whenever Canvas comes back online again IT leadership at schools, colleges and universities need to request Instructure return ALL of their data and hold Instructure in breech of SLA commitments. Instructure and their private equity handlers should be put out of business.
Nolan Zugernat3It’s a big problem. On the other hand though, running your own system these days carries security risks that a lot of schools just don’t have the resources to handle. I’m OK with returning to paper.
Between LLMs, WiFi outages, and Canvas hacks, we gotta start running colleges like Battlestar Galactica. Everything unnetworked; fuck the Cylons
Andy Famiglietti12If department chairs were issued hard-wired phones that looked like WWII radio sets and were required to answer them "English Department Actual" we would never have trouble recruiting chair candidates again
Permission2BFancy4All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again!
Pete2Mr. Gaeta, start the clock
