A system thousands of schools and universities use went offline on Thursday due to a cyberattack, disrupting study as finals approached. According to Associated Press, the hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, which is operated by Instructure. The platform, used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, and lecture videos, was said to have affected nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, with billions of private messages and other records accessed.
The attackers began threatening to leak the data, giving deadlines of Thursday and May 12, signaling ongoing extortion discussions. Universities and school districts began notifying students and parents as the outage spread across the education sector. Some institutions, including the University of Texas at San Antonio, announced finals would be pushed back in response to the outage.