Over 9,000 schools and millions of students use the platform which was down for several hours.
SAN ANTONIO — Millions of students around the world locked out of a popular platform used to access grades and class materials. The Canvas system was taken offline Thursday, but is now up and running again.
Canvas is a cloud platform that students across the country use to get work done, receive assignments, and get those all important grades right before finals. The administrators say they detected unauthorized activity in the system and revoked the party’s access, but say the system is fully back online and available for use.
“Now I’m unable to do my assignments and no one knows what’s going on,” said Michael Lee Chang who is a senior at Sacramento State.
That’s just one of the close to 9,000 schools around the world which use the system that was out for several hours. So what happened? Instructure, the company who runs the platform, says it received a ransom note from a hacking group calling itself “Shinyhunters,” and in it, the group claimed it had data from schools and threatened to leak the info unless a settlement was paid by May 12th. In addition, the group also posted online saying it accessed billions of private messages.
However, many of the schools said no personal information was compromised.
Instructure says it is investigating the incident and in a statement said in part, “As we respond to this incident, we’re focused on three things: completing a rigorous investigation, communicating verified information to impacted customers, and continuing to strengthen the safeguards that protect customer and student data. Trust is earned through actions and we’re committed to earning yours.”
For answers to some of the more pressing questions about the outage, Instructure has a site they will be using for updates on this ongoing case.