Instructure, the vendor that provides Canvas, experienced an outage this afternoon. The learning management system was reportedly infiltrated by cybercriminal group ShinyHunters, according to The Harvard Crimson.
“This is a vendor-level action and is not due to any disruption within district systems,” said Rob Cooper, IT director at the Santa Barbara Unified School District in an email to district staff.
Dos Pueblos High School students, staff, and parents will be temporarily unable to access Canvas, which is used to keep track of assignments, grades, tests, and messages from teachers. As Instructure is currently working to resolve the issue, no action is required by staff or students, according to Cooper.
“We will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates as needed,” Cooper wrote in the email.
Students are currently unable to turn in their school assignments due to the outage, but several teachers have made accommodations.
“It’s a bit frustrating because I can’t turn in my assignments, and it happened as I was attempting to turn in my English assignment in class,” Reagan Widroe (12) said. “I think [my English teacher] said that she would accept it if we turned it in later because of the issues. But fingers crossed that nothing goes wrong.”
ShinyHunters has been involved in numerous cybercrimes since 2019. They are most notably known for data breaches, in which they threaten to leak or sell data on the dark web unless a ransom is paid by the victim company. The group reportedly set a May 12, 2026, deadline for schools to “negotiate a settlement” before “everything is leaked.”
“[ShinyHunters’ actions are] concerning, and that’s exactly what I expected the people who did this to be up to, because Canvas has a lot of information about students on it,” Widroe said. “I would hope that there’s stuff being done about that, and maybe safeguards in the future.”
According to the Canvas page, the site is currently undergoing “scheduled maintenance.”
Updates and information are available on Instructure’s status page.
