BREAKING NEWS

Canvas down during finals, rumors swirl of ‘ShinyHunters’ group

by Seamus Haney | Published May 7, 2026

The University of Minnesota reported students are unable to access ‘Canvas’ this Thursday since 3:20 p.m. Despite lack of official information regarding the outage, circulating images on Reddit, Snapchat and witness testimony suggest a third-party hacker group “ShinyHunters” was the reason for the outage.

Some say the outage is part of a worldwide breach affecting 9,000 schools’ Canvas data that ShinyHunters claims to have gained access to. Newspapers from other schools — The Duke Chronicle, The Harvard Crimson, and more — have reported a similar breach from ShinyHunters to their Canvas pages.