Canvas is back online, but questions — and final exam disruptions — linger

An image of a notice sent by Georgia Tech's information technology department warning users about the Canvas breach on Friday. Michael Warren/AP hide caption toggle caption Michael Warren/AP The online education platform Canvas went offline after a data breach on Thursday, temporarily leaving students and faculty at thousands of U.S. colleges — and K-12 schools — without access to course materials and communications during finals period. "I'm sure somewhere in the country when the outage happened, there probably were people actually taking final exams on the platform when it crashed," says Damon Linker, a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Pennsylvania. Thirty million users — including at half of the higher education institutions in North America — rely on Canvas to manage courses, submit assignments, view grades and facilitate communication, according to its parent company, Instructure. But when Linker and many other users tried to do so on Thursday afternoon, they met a black screen and a warning message. "ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again)," it read. "Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some 'security patches.'" ShinyHunters is the same entity that took credit for a massive Ticketmaster data breach in 2024. …