Update 2:39 p.m. May 8, 2026: Emporia State IT is no longer restricting access to the ESU Canvas portal. Provost Brent Thomas is urging students to “use caution” when using Canvas and to report any suspicious activity to ESU IT Security or the IT Help Desk.
Emporia State IT Security is asking students, faculty and staff to remain off of the university Canvas portal “until further notice” despite access to the platform being back online.
In a Thursday evening status page update, Instructure said the education platform was “back online for most users.”
“While Canvas does appear to be operational again after undergoing maintenance earlier today, IT Security is proceeding with caution until we receive official confirmation from Instructure, the company that operates Canvas, that services are fully restored and stable,” IT Security said in an 11 p.m. email update. In the meantime, access to Canvas “may be temporarily restricted”.
Canvas went down for Emporia State students Thursday afternoon after a reported cybersecurity incident involving the education platform caused it to go offline. The incident affected thousands of higher education institutions nationwide.
Around 4:15 p.m., ESU Information Technology alerted students that Canvas was unavailable and the outage was being investigated by Instructure, the education platform’s vendor.
The cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the Thursday outage in a popup message that appeared on student Canvas pages at universities across the nation. On Thursday, the Kansas State Collegian reported that a Kansas State student had received the popup on their Canvas page.
The message directed affected universities to “negotiate a settlement” with ShinyHunters or risk a leak of stolen sensitive data. The group gave universities and Instructure a May 12 compliance deadline. It is not known at this time whether ESU and its Canvas data were targets of the breach.
Instructure moved Canvas into maintenance mode following the incident. According to Inside Higher Ed, ShinyHunters was behind another Instructure security breach that occurred earlier this week.
