A “security incident” impacting a popular classroom software caused issues for students at schools across the U.S. on Thursday, including Chicago-area universities like Northwestern and Dominican.
Around 2:50 p.m., reports of issues with Canvas, a learning management system used by roughly 40% of higher education institutions in North America, began popping up on Down Detector. By 3:35 p.m., over 8,500 reports had been made by users.
By 5 p.m., Instructure, which owns Canvas, said the software was “fully operational” and no “ongoing unauthorized activity” could be seen by the company at that point.
“As a precaution, we recommend customers follow security best practices, including enforcing MFA on privileged accounts, reviewing admin access, and rotating API tokens or keys where applicable. This will be our final update via this status page for this incident. We will continue to provide updates as appropriate through other channels and are now communicating directly with impacted customers to provide organization-specific information and support,” Instructure said in an update on their status tracking website.
A student at University of Illinois in Chicago said the issues with the software come at a highly stressful time: the day before finals start.
Dominican University sent an email notice to students about the issue, stating Instructure was experiencing a “global outage.”
“This outage appears to be impacting all 9,000 Canvas customers. At this time, DU-IT and Learning Technologies have not been provided with an approximate outage timeframe,” Dominican University said in the email.
A student at Dominican University said when they tried to access Canvas, they got a screen that said “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Check back soon.”
Sean Reynolds, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer for Northwestern University, said the school’s IT office was aware of the issue and monitoring it.
“The vendor has confirmed it is aware the site is unavailable, and we can also confirm that other institutions are experiencing a similar impact. While we don’t have an estimated restoration time from the vendor, please know this incident is not impacting other information technology infrastructure at Northwestern,” Reynolds said.
Loyola University, University of Illinois, and University of Chicago did not immediately respond to NBC Chicago’s inquiries. DePaul University does not use Canvas.
