Canvas education platform back online after cyberattack
May 8, 2026
Access to the educational platform Canvas was restored on Friday, after a major cyberattack upended student access to the tool accross the world.
Tens of thousands of students, most of which were in the midst of final exams, had lost access to the program, causing chaos at schools and universities.
Canvas is used by schools, colleges and universities for grading, as a hub for digital lectures and course materials, a discussion board for classroom projects, and a messaging platform between students and instructors.
Multiple university student newspapers in the US reported on the hack that took place on Thursday.
Harvard University's student newspaper The Harvard Crimson reported that students could not gain access to the site beginning on Thursday, with the site redirecting users to a message from a group called ShinyHunters, which claimed responsibility for the attack and posted a list of schools that had been targeted.
In response to the outage, university teachers reported having to resort to workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments. Some schools were forced to postpone final exams that were scheduled for Friday.
What is ShinyHunters?
ShinyHunters is a loose association of teenage and young adult hackers in the US and the UK.
The group has been linked to other large-scale cyberattacks against major entities like the venue ticket sales platform Ticketmaster.
The group described itself as "rooting your systems since '19," referring to a term used to describe accessing a computer system's deepest layer.
ShinyHunters had sent a warning earlier this week about its activities, threatening to leak the data of nearly 9,000 schools and 275 million individuals, if schools did not pay the ransom by a deadline of May 6.
Reuters reported that some schools reached out to the group to negotiate.
On May 5, ShinnyHunters accused Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, of not even bothering to speak with them to prevent a data leak and said that their demand "was not even as high as you might think."
Edited by: Dmytro Hubenko