Instructure — the educational technology company that owns Canvas — was hacked, causing outages for universities across the country, including WSU Tech.

Canvas is a learning management system, similar to Blackboard.

Canvas is currently unavailable for WSU Tech students. The university said it is “actively working to resolve the issue,” according to an alert on their website. 

On Thursday afternoon, multiple universities reported a message on the Canvas homepage from a hacking group called ShinyHunters, and they claim responsibility for this attack and one that happened on May 1. In the first attack, Instructure reported there was a breach in usernames, email addresses and student ID numbers. 

More than 8,000 universities have been affected by this. 

The note left by the hacker group on Canvas’ website read, “ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again). Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches’.”

The hackers demanded contact with Instructure to negotiate a settlement before May 12 to prevent any data leaks, saying in the note “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… You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is revealed.”

According to Instructure’s website, Canvas was put on maintenance mode and the issue is currently being investigated.