HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Canvas, the online learning platform used extensively at all levels of education across Alabama, was largely back online Friday after a cyberattack knocked it offline and sent students scrambling during one of the most critical weeks of the academic calendar.
FOX54 reached out to several of the larger school systems, universities, and community colleges in the region to gauge the local impact of the outage. At least one local school district has informed parents that certain student information was accessed.
The Breach
The hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the company behind Canvas, according to Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft. The group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed. Instructure said in a late Thursday update that the system had been restored for most users.
Canvas is used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more — making its sudden disappearance particularly disruptive as students tried to access course materials ahead of final exams. Students quickly took to social media to express alarm, and teachers scrambled to find workarounds to help students study and submit final assignments. Some schools, such as the University of Texas at San Antonio, pushed back finals scheduled for Friday in response to the outage…