Canvas outage hits Northwestern, University of Chicago, University of Illinois and more

A nationwide Canvas outage has been reported, and is impacting schools in the Chicago area, including Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and all three campuses of the University of Illinois.

Universities across the country have reported an outage impacting Canvas, the online learning platform used by students and teachers alike for assignments, grading and more. In the Chicago area, multiple colleges have notified their student bodies about the platform being down.

The University of Illinois sent out an email to faculty, staff and students, writing in part, "Canvas, our learning management system, is offline due to an ongoing cybersecurity incident."

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign officials announced Thursday night that they were postponing all final exams and assignments scheduled for Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, including those for classes that don't use Canvas. The university will provide more details regarding Canvas, assignments, and final exams scheduled for next week before noon on Sunday.

According to the university, Canvas parent company Instructure notified them that a data breach that preceded the outage involved users' names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages; but found no evidence that passwords, birthdates, government identifiers, or financial information were involved.

"The vendor has taken measures to protect the platform and is working with a third-party forensics firm on further investigation," the university said.

They said they are awaiting more information from Canvas' parent company regarding when the service may be available again. Course materials will be unavailable until then, the university said.

The University of Chicago had a banner across their IT services website informing students and staff about the disruption, which read, "Instructure, the provider of Canvas, is currently experiencing a disruption, and the University has disabled the Canvas login."

They direct people to their IT Services status page, where a red box titled "Canvas Outage" also says Insturcture is experiencing a cybersecurity incident and that Canvas login has been disabled until the service is available again.

Northwestern tweeted about the outage, writing, "We are monitoring an issue affecting Canvas. Instructure is aware of the issue and is investigating it. We can confirm that other institutions are also impacted. Details will be posted as available on the Status of University IT Services web page."

Instructure and Canvas have not yet commented on their social media pages about the outage.

Further information was not immediately available. How long the outage would last was not immediately clear. 

Joseph Steinberg, a cybersecurity expert and lecturer at Columbia University, uses the Canvas program which was hacked.

"The reality is the timing is obviously not great for people taking finals in college, or in university in general," he said.

As spring semesters come to end, any student looking to access notes, study guides, or even final exams on Canvas can't get the resources they need.

It's unclear when the problem will be resolved, but every hour it takes could impact when the spring semester concludes.

"If it does carry on for, you know, longer than that, my expectation is that universities would find workarounds. Either universities that don't normally administer tests on paper will do so. They'll find a mechanism. I don't think anybody wants to delay graduation," Steinberg said.

Steinberg said the Canvas outage should serve as a reminder for everyone who relies on technology to have a contingency plan in place.

"People have a tendency to view the cloud as this magical place where technology always works, but there is no cloud. It's just somebody else's computer," he said. "You need some sort of mechanism to deal with outages. They're going to happen. It's just a question of when, and if you're prepared, the outages are usually no big deal, and if you're not prepared, they're usually very big deal."