A cyberattack on Canvas knocked out access for students at Harvard, Columbia, and hundreds of other schools during finals

Canvas, operated by Instructure, suffered a cybersecurity incident that pushed the platform into maintenance mode and briefly blocked access at hundreds of schools.

Students and staff at Harvard, Columbia, Rutgers, Georgetown, and many other campuses were disrupted during finals week.

Attackers linked to ShinyHunters claimed stolen data and altered some login pages, raising concerns about user data exposure.

The outage highlighted how heavily schools rely on a single learning platform and how quickly a cyberattack can become a nationwide academic disruption.