UPDATE

The Canvas system at Peninsula College was restored and back online and operational for all users by 1 p.m., Friday, May 8, 2026. 

ORIGINAL STORY:

Peninsula College is among thousands of higher education institutions around the world hit by a massive cyberattack that has crippled the important learning platforms called Canvas. That’s a platform that’s used to manage grades, course notes, assignments, lecture videos and more, according to the Olympic Herald online newspaper. The hacking group named ShinyHunters posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, according to Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emisoft.

Peninsula College students trying to log into Canvas yesterday were first greeted by what looked like a routine maintenance message — a cartoon rocket ship and a note saying the system was undergoing scheduled work.

But that changed quickly. A new banner now stretches across the college’s website, warning that Canvas is down globally with no estimated time for restoration.

Behind the outage is what cybersecurity analysts are calling one of the largest education?sector cyberattacks in history.

Instructure — the company behind the Canvas learning platform says Canvas has been breached by the criminal extortion group known as ShinyHunters. The hackers claim they’ve stolen 275 million records and more than 3.6 terabytes of data, impacting nearly 9,000 educational institutions worldwide.

For Peninsula College, that means the personal information and private communications of students and faculty may now be in the hands of cybercriminals.

On a dark?web leak site, ShinyHunters posted a ransom note, saying they’ve breached Instructure “again” and mocking the company for focusing on security patches instead of responding to them. The group has given Instructure — and every affected school — until the end of the day on May 12th to negotiate.

As of this morning, the Peninsula College website says there is no estimated time for restoration at this time. It also says updates will be made on our Canvas Security Incident & Outage Notification webpage. 

PHOTO: Peninsula College