A cyber attack hit several universities and schools in the US, Canada and Australia, causing chaos, confusion and major disruptions amid the high stakes end-of-year season.
The hacking group ShinyHunters reportedly claimed responsibility for the attack, which caused the academic software Canvas used by thousands of schools and universities to go offline this week.
By late Thursday, the company Instructure, which owns Canvas, posted an update on its website saying that Canvas was “available for most users”, but some universities were still reporting outages on Friday.
The cyber attacks targeted universities and schools across the globe, affecting an estimated 9,000 institutions.
The University of Sydney told students on Friday “Canvas was unavailable” and instructed students not to attempt to log in.
“We are one of approximately 9000 institutions around the world that are impacted by this outage, and we are still waiting for advice from Instructure,” the university wrote in an announcement on its website.
The outage affected students’ coursework and examinations, the university said, acknowledging “how disruptive this is at a critical time in the semester”.
Mississippi State University announced that it was postponing Friday’s final exams to allow affected students to recover any lost work.
