Software the University of Kansas uses to let students access class materials, submit assignments, get grades, communicate with professors and even take exams has gone offline just days before finals because of a cyberattack on the platform’s parent company.
Canvas, the software that is run by technology company Instructure, went down for KU students, staff and faculty Thursday afternoon. According to KU Information Technology, the issue is on the vendor’s side.
“We understand this may disrupt teaching, learning, exams, and the submission of work through Canvas,” a 6:53 p.m. email from KU Information Technology reads. “In the meantime, please monitor the KU IT Alerts page and the Instructure status page for updates.”
Friday is stop day at KU, a break before finals week when teachers aren’t allowed to schedule mandatory classes or meetings. Many students use the extra day to prepare for finals, which will run from Monday, May 11 through Friday, May 15.
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Seniors Isis Norris and Ella Wallace weren’t too concerned about navigating the outage, but said it could cause challenges for students as they prepare for finals.
Norris, a history major, said many professors host timed exams through Canvas and have posted study guides for exams there. She had a Thursday afternoon class where the instructor had planned to review for the final by going through the Canvas page and discussing past assignments.
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“Which obviously we could not do, but it was fine,” she said. “We just kind of tried to improvise and go off the dome.”
Wallace, who is studying exercise science, has an assignment due Thursday night. She anticipated that professors will need to adjust due dates, but hasn’t heard from any instructors yet about next steps.
“I have a lot of assignments due within the next few days, a lot of exams and stuff, and it makes it especially difficult because I can’t access any of my modules, any of my assignments,” she said.
Inside Higher Ed reported Tuesday that hackers who have targeted Ticketmaster, Google and multiple large universities have now turned their sights on Canvas and Instructure.
The criminal extortion group “claimed its attack on Instructure affected nearly 9,000 schools worldwide (including a mix of K–12 and higher education institutions) and compromised the personal identifying information of 275 million people, including students, teachers and staff,” per the article.
Inside Higher Ed also reported that hackers sent a ransom message to Instructure. The message alleged that if Instructure did not pay the ransom, the hackers would leak “Several billions of private messages among students and teachers and students and other students involved” by Wednesday.
Instructure believed it had contained the attack Tuesday, according to Inside Higher Ed. More recent reporting from CNN says that this recent outage is also caused by the same group of hackers, who have pushed their ransom deadline to Tuesday, May 12.
Per Instructure, they began investigating the latest issue with iterations of the Canvas software Thursday afternoon and placed it in maintenance mode at 4:37 p.m.
“We anticipate being up soon, and will provide updates as soon as possible,” their site reads.
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Wulfe Wulfemeyer (they/them), reporter and news editor, has worked with The Lawrence Times since May 2025. They can be reached at [email protected].
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