Canvas Down Across US: ShinyHunters Hits Instructure Again

Canvas went down across the U.S. on May 7th, with around 10,000 user reports of problems. Penn's Daily Pennsylvanian reported a ShinyHunters ransom message rendered on Penn's Canvas pages before the system was replaced with a "scheduled maintenance" notice. ShinyHunters has extended their pay-or-leak deadline to May 12 for both Instructure and the affected schools, and is offering individual schools the chance to negotiate separately. Some institutions are reportedly engaging in those negotiations. About 8,800 institutions are on the affected list, including all eight Ivy League universities, Duke, and 44 Dutch institutions. Penn's student newspaper reports over 306,000 Penn users are in the leak. The message accused Instructure of ignoring the group and just patching their systems instead of negotiating. Instructure has not publicly acknowledged any new intrusion and has said the original April incident is resolved with no ongoing unauthorized activity. The connection between today's outage and the breach has not been formally established by Instructure. Sources: https://www.thedp.com/article/2026/05/penn-canvas-shinythunters-data-breach-hack-second https://artthreat.net/29648-88672-canvas-down-across-us-as-shinyhunters-hack-forces-outage-extortion-threat-issued/ https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/administrative-tech/2026/05/05/pay-or-leak-hackers-target-big-higher-ed-vendor More on cybersecurity, privacy, scams, and homelab on Hake Hardware. New shorts every weekday. #cybersecurity #shinyhunters #databreach