Canvas Hack: Why are students grateful and happy as massive outage leaves universities across US stranded

Major US universities, including Harvard University and Stanford University, along with thousands of other institutions, were impacted by a massive cyberattack on Thursday (May 7, 2026) following an earlier data breach. The attack, reportedly claimed by ShinyHunters, a cyber extortion group active since at least 2019, disrupted access to the Canvas learning platform.

While the outage left many students frustrated and scrambling for access, others welcomed the disruption, saying the hack could lead to extended academic deadlines. One student affected by the cyberattack said he panicked after being suddenly logged out of his Canvas account while studying for final exams at the University of Pennsylvania.

Students trying to access the system saw a message from the hacking group saying servers belonging to Canvas's parent company Instructure had "again" been breached, news agency AFP reported, citing the Harvard Crimson student newspaper and posts on social media. "Instead of contacting us to resolve it, they ignored us and did some 'security patches,'" the hackers said, according to the news agency.


"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...to negotiate a settlement." The group warned it would release all stolen data if schools did not make contact by May 12. The message included a link to a list of schools ShinyHunters claims to have breached through Canvas.

How did students react to the Canvas hack?

“The biggest cause of fear and anxiety in me is that I was deprived of significant resources to study and do the best,” Anish Garimidi, a junior at the university, told CNN. While dubbing the incident “very troubling,” Garimidi also expressed towards his professors, saying that he is grateful to them for being “were accommodating and sending materials through other means.”

Another student, a sophomore at Georgetown University, said she returned home to Kentucky last week because her remaining projects were online through Canvas. But the Thursday outage hit students at her school, who were instead greeted by a ransom note, Minhal Nazeer told CNN.

While a lot of students are “freaking out,” others, including her, are happy because the hack means students will have extended deadlines, Nazeer said.

Stanford University also hit by outage

Stanford University said Canvas was "currently unavailable due to an issue being experienced by the vendor," adding that Instructure had recently disclosed a nationwide information security issue it said had been contained. But a further outage was now affecting Canvas customers, including Stanford and "numerous other educational institutions nationwide," the university added.

Instructure said the stolen data in the original breach included personal details such as names, email addresses, and student ID numbers, along with private messages exchanged between users.