Tens of thousands of students studying for final exams around the world Friday regained access to a key online learning system after a cyberattack had earlier knocked it offline, throwing schools and universities into turmoil.

Canvas was embraced by the University of Colorado system about a decade ago and quickly became a mainstay of the educational — and teacher-student communication — toolbox, said Michele Ames, the university system’s vice president of communications.

Instructors now are scrambling to find workarounds to the crash, which couldn’t have come at a more critical time: finals week. 

“This situation has impacted all four of the campuses at the University of Colorado,” said Ames, whose school operates campuses in Colorado Springs, Denver, Boulder and Aurora. “Most higher ed institutions use Canvas as their primary teaching and learning platform. This is where professors talk to their students. It’s where students turn in papers. So yes, it (the hack) has had a significant impact.”

The Canvas platform appeared to be working earlier Friday, Ames said, but teachers and students were still being encouraged to go old school.

“We are continuing to tell people that they need to make alternate plans, because we don’t have any confidence in the stability of the platform at this point,” Ames said.

A spokesperson at Pikes Peak State College said Friday the college does not use Canvas.

UCCS sophomore Autumn Otradovec told the university’s student-run newspaper, The Scribe, that she was staying calm while acknowledging that if the problem continued into the weekend, she may start sending emails to teachers, asking for extensions. 

“I have a lot of big projects,” Otradovec said. 

Across academia, the Canvas outage set off panic and confusion as students and faculty members found themselves locked out.

Colleges scrambled to reschedule final exams as students lost any way to access materials they needed to study.

Instructure, the company behind Canvas, said in an update late Thursday that the system was available for most users.

“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,” Instructure said Friday in a statement. “Out of an abundance of caution, we immediately took Canvas offline to contain access and further investigate.”

Instructure also said it confirmed that the unauthorized actor exploited an issue related to its Free-For-Teacher accounts. The company has temporarily shut down those accounts.

Instructure did not say whether it paid a ransom nor has it said what happened with the compromised data.

Rich in digitized data, the nation’s schools are prime targets for far-flung criminal hackers, who are assiduously locating and scooping up sensitive files that not long ago were committed to paper in locked cabinets. Past attacks have hit Minneapolis Public Schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Hackers breached data days before the outage

A hacking group called ShinyHunters claimed responsibility for the breach at Canvas, said Luke Connolly, a threat analyst at the cybersecurity firm Emsisoft. The hacking group posted online that nearly 9,000 schools worldwide were affected, with billions of private messages and other records accessed, Connolly said.

Elizabeth Polo, a University of Maryland junior, was in class late Thursday afternoon when a classmate shouted, “Canvas got hacked.” A message from a hacking collective flashed on her computer screen.

The message to Polo urged individual schools to reach out directly to the hacking group to negotiate a settlement and threatened to leak data if they didn’t. She said that Canvas later took that message down, replacing it with a message saying the site was undergoing scheduled maintenance.

Just before 1 a.m. Friday, Polo was able to submit an assignment on Canvas, but she now worries personal data has been compromised.

Canvas went down just as deadlines were hitting

That the attack came with finals looming came as no surprise to Huseyin Can Yuceel, the security research lead at Picus Labs.

“Timing is everything, because they want to inflict pain as much as possible,” he said, “so they can extort money out of it.”

Teachers said they had to find workarounds to help students study for exams and submit final assignments. Some schools, such as the University of Texas at San Antonio, announced they were pushing back finals scheduled for Friday in response to the outage.

Rod Uzat, a professor of Educational Leadership at the University of Texas Permian Basin, pushed back the posting of grades by a day.

“The concern is for those of us who were doing the grading if there’s anything left,” Uzat said.

Gazette reporter Stephanie Earls contributed to this report.