The cybercrime extortion group ShinyHunters allegedly hacked Instructure, causing Canvas outages at Kansas State and 9,000 other higher education institutes on Thursday.
At around 3:15 p.m., a message appeared on the home page of Canvas alerting users that ShinyHunters had breached Instructure, and Instructure had not contacted the hacker group to fix the issue.
According to the popup, “If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at TOX to negotiate a settlement. You have till the end of the day by 12 May 2026 before everything is leaked.”
A notification on Instructure’s website confirmed the company is investigating the incident.
A K-State Alert sent to students and faculty around 3:20 p.m. said, “Canvas is unavailable at this time. We are actively working to review the issue.”
Another K-State Alert followed around 4 p.m. The alert read, “Kansas State University was recently notified by Instructure, the parent company of the university’s learning management system, Canvas. The event affects approximately 8,800 educational institutions, including K-State.”
According to the alert, the Office of the Provost emailed K-State instructors concerning alternative communication methods as Canvas remains down.
K-State also requested users to report suspicious cyber alerts to abuse@k-state.edu.
Laken Dyn, junior in animal science, was among the students who received the ShinyHunters popup. She said the notification didn’t scare her too much, but its bad timing this close to finals week.
“I’m not worried so much about privacy because there’s not really anything on my Canvas that I wouldn’t be okay with being shared, but from a logistics standpoint, it’s like, ‘Wow, if I can’t get this in to my professor in the next thirty minutes am I going to get in trouble or get points off?’ I really hope everyone can have some grace with this.”
Dyn also advises students not to click on the links listed at the bottom of the Canvas popup.
“It looks very, very not good, like, very sketchy and definitely like a virus,” she said. “Yeah, I’m not crazy about that.”
The Collegian plans to follow this story as it develops.
