Canvas by Instructure was down for thousands of users on Thursday. While many got a message from hacker group ShinyHunters, others saw a maintenance message issued by the company.
This caused confusion among many and people took to X to raise their voices. At the time of writing over 4,000 people were still facing issues with the educational platform, as per Downdetector.
“According to this email from the school, Canvas is supposed to be “fully operational”. I guess a hack now counts as a scheduled maintenance in the IT world!,” one person commented on the messaging from Canvas.
Another added “What do you mean they hacked CANVAS. Mine says its down for scheduled maintenance but I know I never heard about it.. and I know that I would’ve heard about it from my AP Psych teacher ’cause we have AAQ and EBQ practices due tomorrow that he’s gonna grade over the weekend.”
Also Read | Canvas down after ShinyHunters hack: Harvard, Duke among schools affected; check list
Yet another said “”Scheduled maintenance” Are we sure something else isn’t happening with Canvas?”.
Meanwhile, several others posted messages about the hack by ShinyHunters. “Canvas was hit with a nasty ransomeware. So alot of students are getting this message when they try to log in to canvas. Canvas gets hacked during Finals week is insane,” one person commented and shared a photo of the message about the hack.
What Canvas said on the matter
While Instructure had noted a security breach days back, it did not mention the hack today. On its status page, Instructure noted “Canvas, Canvas Beta and Canvas Test are currently unavailable.”
They added that the matter was under investigation. “We are currently investigating this issue,” the company posted as of 14:41 MDT or 16:41 ET. They did not provide a timeline by when services might be restored.
Prior to this, Canvas had noted another issue “We are currently investigating an issue where some users are having difficulties logging into Student ePortfolios. This is not affecting customers,” they had said.
Canvas Instructure planned maintenance usually lasts from 15 minutes to two hours for standard updates. They usually occurring during low-traffic, early morning hours. Some enhancements can cause up to 60–90 minutes of disruption for specific features but total system outages are usually brief. Notably, Canvas has not scheduled maintenance planned today as per reports. Instead, it is facing widespread outage due to the security breach.
Who are ShinyHunters?
ShinyHunters reportedly claimed to have hacked Harvard, MIT, and Oxford, other major organizations, including Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Cambridge, Cornell, Berkeley, and Georgetown as per TechRadar. The Blackhat group has been behind attacks on Ticketmaster, AT&T in the past.
