Texas Tech University leadership has notified the campus community it is among numerous institutions around the country impacted by an ongoing outage of the Canvas online course/content management system.
The outage comes as students are in the midst of submitting final assignments or taking tests as the spring semester wraps up.
The USA TODAY network is reporting the Canvas outage is impacting the online system nationwide and may stem from a cyberattack.
DownDetector indicated that there were issues being reported by users, according to an article from For the Win. And Instructure’s status page had this to say as of 11:21 MDT: “We are currently investigating an issue where some users are having difficulties logging into Student ePortfolios. This is not affecting customers.”
This comes after multiple reports of a cyberattack by a hacker group called ShinyHunters, according to For the Win. Student newspapers at multiple universities including Duke, Harvard and Penn report that students were affected.
How is Texas Tech responding to the Canvas outage and cyber attack?
The university released a statement to students and faculty, offering guidelines about how to move forward pending a resolution.
Tech’s statement continues:
We are aware of a nationwide outage currently impacting Canvas and related services. We do not have an estimated time to resolution, but we are actively monitoring updates from the vendor.
We understand the disruption this may cause and appreciate your patience as the issue is being addressed.
Please know the following:
We will continue to share updates as more information becomes available.
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Texas Tech responds to nationwide Canvas outage impacting finals
Reporting by Adam D. Young, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal / Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
