Canvas is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Connolly said.
Screen shots Connolly provided showed that the group began threatening Sunday to leak the trove of data. By Friday, Instructure and Canvas had been removed from a dedicated leak site created by the ransomware group on the dark web to publish stolen data.
Canvas went down Thursday at the worst possible time. Students quickly took to social media, with many panicking that they could no longer view course materials housed within the platform to study for their final exams.
Teachers said they were having to find workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments. And some schools, such as the University of Texas at San Antonio, announced they were pushing back finals scheduled for Friday in response to the outage.
Instructure has not posted about the attack on its social media. The company didn’t immediately respond to emails from The Associated Press asking whether it paid a ransom and inquiring about what happened with the compromised data.
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