Yesterday, May 7, the cybercriminal group ShinyHunters hacked Canvas by Instructure, shutting down the platform for nearly 9,000 schools — including SDSU. 

At around 1 p.m., Canvas web users were greeted with a pop-up message from the hackers, explaining that the affected schools had “till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked” to negotiate a settlement. As a result, Instructure decided to temporarily take Canvas offline, which lasted until around 10 p.m. that same day.

On May 3, the hackers announced that they breached Instructure and threatened to leak data from nearly 275 million individuals, noting “several billions of private messages.” The group requested Instructure reach out to them by May 6, “before we leak along with several annoying (digital) problems that’ll come your way.”

In yesterday’s pop-up message, the hackers reported that Instructure did not reach out and instead opted for “security patches.”

SDSU sent out its first of many communications at 1:53 p.m. on May 7, acknowledging the worldwide outage. Later communications encouraged faculty to communicate with students via other channels, relieving data breach concerns and to report individual ransomware emails.

The university also acknowledged the additional stress the outage placed on students during the first day of finals week and that faculty have been asked to provide alternate dates or options for affected coursework.

First-year business management student Cory Lipscomb was in the middle of an online exam when the platform went offline.

“I just went to click the next question and then it popped up this screen and I was really confused,” Lipscomb said. “I was like, ‘Whoa, is this just me. What’s going on?’ So then I asked a few people around me, who were also working on an assignment [and] they were like, ‘Yeah, like I just got the same message, Canvas is now down.’”

As a result, his professor has moved the online exam to Monday, but Lipscomb explained that wasn’t the case for everyone. 

“A lot of my friends were concerned because some of their stuff got postponed and then they have in-person exams to do through Canvas,” he said. “… Some of them do have their flights back home since finals week is done next week. So, they were more so concerned on the timeframe and how it would accommodate to them and their plans.”

Lipscomb said he felt reassured by campus communications and wasn’t too concerned about the data leak threat. 

“It sounds a little concerning, but at the same time, I don’t think it’s like targeting individual people. It’s more so, I think, targeting Instructure [and] Canvas as a whole. So I wasn’t really too concerned on what information they could have on me,” Lipscomb said.

It is still unclear as to why Instructure opted to reactivate Canvas or what they discovered in their investigation. 

Finals will continue as normal at SDSU, with the university encouraging students to exercise caution when navigating Canvas and to communicate with faculty directly with questions.