Michiana schools were among those impacted by an outage of the learning management system Canvas. Instructure, the company behind Canvas, says it temporarily took the system offline, after identifying "unauthorized activity.” It happened during many colleges’ finals week.
On Thursday, the University of Notre Dame said Canvas was unavailable for all of its users and the university was looking into the impacts on courses. By Friday afternoon, Notre Dame said access had been restored for most users. But it encouraged people “to remain alert for suspicious emails, messages or requests,” and recommended that faculty download grade information, in case Canvas goes out again.
The South Bend Community School Corporation says it was also impacted, but classes have been able to continue. A spokesperson says the district has disabled certain data connections and third-party tools in Canvas, at the recommendation of the Indiana Office of Technology. That means it’s unable to synchronize rosters and grades with PowerSchool, for now. The school corporation says there’s no evidence that its systems were breached locally.
Meanwhile, an Elkhart Community Schools spokesperson says the district has been in communication with Instructure, but the company "has not responded with information concerning this incident or their response to the incident."
As of Friday afternoon, Canvas remained unavailable for Indiana University users, but was back for Ivy Tech.
Instructure says it hasn’t found any evidence that data was taken during Thursday’s incident, but certain personal information was taken in an incident last month.
