Massive Canvas data breach hits colleges across California and nation, crippling student work

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A cybersecurity breach at the company behind the Canvas learning management system used widely across higher education institutions grew into a widespread outage Thursday that left students and faculty at dozens of California campuses locked out of an essential platform used to access coursework, readings and assignments during finals preparations.The disruption at Instructure follows a breach disclosed last week in which a hacker group claimed it stole hundreds of millions of records tied to students and employees at roughly 9,000 schools in the U.S., Australia and Europe.The group ShinyHunters — which previously has claimed to be behind hacks of Ticketmaster and AT&T — is taking credit.On Thursday, California students trying to log into Canvas instead got a message in white writing against a black backdrop:“If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at TOX to negotiate a settlement.

You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked.”A UC Berkeley student shared a screenshot of the threat with The Times.By evening, the student said the login process was updated to redirect users to a page that said Canvas was “undergoing scheduled maintenance.”On its website, Instructure said Thursday afternoon that it had put Canvas “in maintenance mode.”“We anticipate being up soon, and will provide updates as soon as possible” the company said.On Wednesday the firm said Canvas was “fully operational and we are not seeing any ongoing unauthorized activity” after the attacks.

The message said that the breach involved “names, email addresses, and student ID numbers, as well as messages among users,” but not passwords, dates of birth, financial information or “government identifiers.”An Instructure spokesperson di...