Contra Costa Community College District warns of Canvas outage as cyberattack shuts down platform

Thousands of Contra Costa Community College District students were unable to access their online coursework on Thursday after a hacking group took down Canvas, the learning platform used by the district's three colleges, due to a massive data breach affecting institutions worldwide.

The district posted a notice on its website acknowledging the outage, saying the problem was not isolated to its campuses.

"We are aware of the current Canvas outage affecting access to the platform," the district said. "At this time, the issue appears to be impacting Canvas users broadly and is not isolated to our district." The district said it was monitoring the situation and awaiting information from Instructure, Canvas's parent company.

Students at other institutions, such as Contra Costa, use Canvas as their primary learning management system. They received an email on Thursday afternoon under the subject line "Canvas Breach – Do Not Access," warning that "a cyber incident with Instructure/Canvas is still active" and urging students to stay off the platform entirely. A follow-up message warned of an "uptick of phishing campaigns alongside this breach," telling students to question any emails or texts prompting them to enter credentials or personal information.

Instructure's own status page confirmed the scope of the problem, stating that "Canvas, Canvas Beta, and Canvas Test are currently unavailable" as of Thursday afternoon, with the company saying it was investigating.

The hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility, saying its attack affected nearly 9,000 schools worldwide and compromised the personally identifiable information of 275 million students, teachers, and staff. The group claimed to have stolen students' names, personal email addresses, and messages exchanged between teachers and students, the same categories of data that Instructure acknowledged were taken.

Students attempting to log into Canvas on Thursday were met with a warning page after the hacking group ShinyHunters took down the platform following a data breach affecting millions of students and staff at nearly 9,000 institutions worldwide.

The Contra Costa Community College District uses Canvas as its main system for online learning and instruction, serving students across Contra Costa College, Diablo Valley College, and Los Medanos College.

ShinyHunters set a deadline of May 6 for Instructure to pay, warning the company to "make the right decision, don't be the next headline." When that deadline passed without payment, the group pushed it to May 12, saying some institutions had engaged in ransom negotiations, and warned that all data would be leaked by that date "except the ones that pay."

By Thursday afternoon, more than 15,000 users had reported outages to Downdetector, which tracks service disruptions by aggregating user reports.
The Contra Costa Community College District said it would share updates as soon as it received additional information from Instructure.

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