Des Moines Public Schools is among thousands of universities and schools across the country that has found its access to Canvas, a web-based learning management system, disrupted following a cybersecurity attack.
Instructure, which owns the Canvas software, announced May 1 it was the subject of an attack, according to the New York Times. ShinyHunters, a hacking group, claimed responsibility for Instructure’s data breach.
The disruption comes at a time when students and educators are preparing for or are in the midst of final exams and projects.
When trying to access Canvas websites the afternoon of May 7, DMPS users and others received a message that read “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Check back soon.”
DMPS’ Canvas site appeared to be back up shortly after 9 p.m.
A May 7 post earlier in the day on Instructure’s status website stated it was looking into an issue where some users were “having difficulties logging into Student ePortfolios.” An update hours later, stated several Canvas products were being put into “maintenance mode.”
“We were notified by Instructure, the company that owns the Canvas service, that they were the target of a cybersecurity incident,” said Phil Roeder, a district spokesperson, the same day.
Canvas is “used to provide students access to a range of materials and resources for their classes,” Roeder said.
“We’re not aware that this (outage) impacted anything during the school day today,” he said. “We hope to learn more from Instructure tomorrow (May 8). DMPS is in the same boat as 9,000 other educational institutions on this issue.”
Samantha Hernandez covers education for the Register. Reach her at (515) 851-0982 or svhernandez@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Des Moines schools’ Canvas access disrupted by cyberattack
Reporting by Samantha Hernandez, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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