LALS VEGAS (KTNV) — We're learning that Canvas services are slowly being restored to students in the Las Vegas Valley.
An alert posted on the University of Nevada Las Vegas website notes that as of Friday morning, access to WebCampus (Canvas) has been restored, and that system operations have resumed.
WATCH: Senior Reporter Mary Kielar spoke to students about the outage
We talked to Eli Calandra who said it was a frantic scene on campus when Canvas shut down.
"This is probably like the worst thing that could’ve happened," he said. But he was relieved with how quickly it was restored, and said he felt UNLV did a good job communicating during the incident.
We also received a notice from the College of Southern Nevada that access to Canvas has been restored and normal system operations have resumed.
Shortly after, the Clark County School District posted that service had been restored.
This comes after the hacking group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas on Thursday.
The social media post from CCSD said that according to Instructure, the incident involved unauthorized changes to certain platform pages. The issue has been contained, and there is no evidence that user credentials were compromised or that data was accessed or shared outside the system.
On Friday, Channel 13 spoke to the Deputy Superintendent of Business Development Felicia Gonzales about the incident.
"It didn't have that much disruption to our schools, but we were prepared to actually launch an alternative platform so that teaching and learning [could] continue]" she said.
In 2023, CCSD suffered from a major student data breach. Gonzales said this incident and the one a few years ago are two separate things.
"The safety of not only our students but of our staff is critical," she added.
Instructure sent us the following statement confirming the cause of the outage:
“Yesterday, Instructure discovered the unauthorized actor involved in our ongoing security incident made changes to the pages that appeared when some students and teachers were logged in. Out of an abundance of caution, we immediately took Canvas offline to contain access and further investigate.
We have confirmed that the unauthorized actor exploited an issue related to our Free-For-Teacher accounts.
As a result, we have made the difficult decision to temporarily shut down our Free-For-Teacher accounts. This gives us the confidence to restore access to Canvas, which is now fully back online and available for use. We regret the inconvenience and concern this may have caused.”
We brought you extensive coverage Thursday evening on how the outage was affecting students across the valley, especially for college students in the midst of final exams, which you can watch here:
The messages from each institution went on to say that faculty are encouraged to provide flexibility for students, and it is recommended to download any essential materials needed for the remainder of the respective semesters.
We also reached out to the Nevada System of Higher Education as many NSHE institutions were affected by the outage, and below is the full statement we received in response:
The Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) is actively monitoring a cybersecurity incident reported by Instructure affecting its Canvas learning management system. Canvas access was disrupted yesterday for users across thousands of institutions, including NSHE institutions that rely on the platform. Instructure has since reported that the issue has been resolved, and services have been restored at NSHE institutions.
We are supporting our institutions as they work with students and staff to address any remaining disruption. While access to Canvas has been restored, this remains a fluid situation, and we will continue to monitor developments closely.