Western Washington University is among 9,000 schools in a nationwide Canvas cyberattack, rendering the website nonfunctional as of May 7, 2026.
According to The Collegiate Times and The Daily Pennsylvanian, a message from cybercrime group ShinyHunters appeared on the Canvas dashboard threatening to release student data. Similar reports of the same message came from posts on the Western Yik Yak, a location-based and anonymous social media app.
“ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again),” the message read. “Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches.’”
On May 1, 2026, ShinyHunters claimed to have breached Canvas and extracted over 3.6 terabytes of data from Instructure.
Many semester-based universities have finished spring semesters across the country, while some are in their final semester. Western is among those on the quarter system, with midterm season in full swing.
“You have till the end of the day by May 12, 2026 before everything is leaked,” the message said.
Western's Chief Information Officer, Chuck Lanham, sent a mass email about the system status at 4:29 p.m., noting that Instructure refuses to negotiate with the threat actors.
“The full scope of data involved for WWU has not yet been determined; however, early indicators are that it may be contained with names, email addresses, and student IDs,” Lanham said in the statement. “This is a vendor-driven incident — WWU’s own internal systems have not been directly affected.”
“Instructure has placed Canvas, Canvas Beta and Canvas Test in maintenance mode. We anticipate being up soon, and will provide updates as soon as possible,” read the Instructure status page on May 7, 2026, at 4:37 p.m.
This is a developing story, check back for updates.
River Martinez (he/him) is a city news reporter for The Front this quarter. He is a first-year visual journalism and political science major. River spends his time doing model United Nations, climbing and tinkering on his film camera. You can reach him at marti722@wwu.edu.
