Canvas Restored After Temporary Outage

Instructure temporarily suspended Canvas yesterday after unauthorized changes affecting some Canvas pages at universities across the nation.

This was related to a data security incident affecting Instructure earlier in the week. USU officials worked to minimize the impacts to students and faculty, not knowing how long the outage would last at that point.

Instructure restored service to Canvas late Thursday night and provided frequently asked questions about the situation on their website.

According to Instructure: “On May 7, an unauthorized actor made changes to the pages that appeared when some students and teachers were logged in. We quickly identified this unauthorized activity and immediately took steps to contain it, including temporarily taking Canvas offline into maintenance mode as a precaution. Working with an independent forensics partner, we have found no evidence that the actor established persistence, obtained credentials, or exfiltrated data.”

At this time, there is no indication that USU systems were compromised.

USU will continue to monitor updates from Instructure and will share additional information if it impacts our campus community on the status webpage for this incident.