Security

May 7, 2026

Unplanned Canvas Outage

Denison Security

ITS is aware of a national Canvas service outage and is looking into the issue. Our teams are in constant contact with the service provider and are monitoring the situation in real-time. At this moment, we have no specific details regarding the duration of the outage or a definitive restoration window. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.

Update: May 8, 2026 10:35am EDT

At approximately 10:50pm last night (May 7, 2026), Instructure engineers brought Canvas’s main production environment back online.

Denison ITS is taking active steps to remediate the damage and mitigate or minimize any potential losses that may occur as a result of these incidents. When logging into the Canvas website, you may notice that some data is out-of-date, as we have paused certain data syncs.

Update: May 7, 2026 7:30pm EDT

We have learned that today’s Canvas outage was a result of a second cyberattack impacting Instructure, the parent company of Canvas.

This attack was likely carried out by the same threat actor that breached Instructure recently, SCATTERED LAPSUS, also known as ShinyHunters. SCATTERED LAPSUS is known as a “pay or leak” threat actor. Their modus operandi is to steal large amounts of sensitive data, then demand a ransom payment. If the ransom is not paid, they are known to release the data on dark web marketplaces.

We have no specific details about the outage.


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Denison Service Desk

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