Canvas down: ‘This couldn’t happen at a worse time… Today is my deadline’

A cyberattack on Canvas has urged the university to shut down the course software, leaving students locked out of their classes materials and unable to submit assignments. Students are angry, anxious, and scared.

Some students are not able to continue their work within their personal schedule. Others are missing assignments deadlines and are demanding answers about how this could impact exam dates. “I have four exams in June, hence why staying on track is really important. I am wondering if this will influence exam dates or exam content”, says Lee-Ann Curtis, a third  year Psychology student.

Course materials on Dropbox

Some teachers already started sharing class materials with students through Dropbox, although using external platforms is officially discouraged by the university. This is a solution that Lee-Ann would be interested in if the situation doesn’t change soon. “Since I still have a month and I’m expecting it to be fixed by Monday the latest, my worries and frustrations are still low. But if this becomes a longer lasting issue, I will try to get the materials via the course coordinator.”

Lack of information

Even though the platform was shut down only last night after it got hacked for a second time, students are frustrated that this wasn’t communicated quicker and better. Just like Lee-Ann expresses her confusion over not being able to find more information on the Erasmus website, others are affected by this lack of updates too.

“It wasn’t clear to me that Canvas was going to be shut down. I don’t understand why they didn’t put an announcement on the main page. I only found out from the Dutch news yesterday saying that a lot of people got affected due to the privacy breach”, adds Mariana Stapel, a Communications and Media student. The university put a message on the main MyEUR page on Friday morning. “I’m a third-year student, I’m already struggling so much managing everything else, I don’t want to be thinking about whether I can access Canvas or not. I just want to do my work.”

Affected deadlines

“This couldn’t happen at a worse time… Today is my deadline for my project submission”, says Tomek Zająkała, a Strategic Management student. “Fortunately for me, I’ve been working on it for the past week and have every material and necessary requirement downloaded on my laptop. So, I guess I just have to message my professor to ask where I should submit it. But it’s weird that they haven’t contacted us already to give us that information.”

With the end of the year approaching, many students are working on their thesis and have tight deadlines for each chapter. Viktoria Radeva, studying Media and Business, is one of them. “I’m currently writing my thesis and this morning I had a meeting with my supervisor. She told me that I need to add information about credibility and for that I should look into the Media Methods course, which is only available on Canvas. So right now I can’t write and finish my methodology part and have to wait for Canvas to be up again”, she says. “While I’m not nervous yet, if this isn’t fixed soon it’s going to mess up my schedule a lot. It will be very hard to catch up.”

Even though students understand the worries over a privacy breach, the weight of their deadlines can be more overwhelming to them. “While my data being leaked sounds super scary, I’m more worried about not being able to finish my thesis on time”, admits Viktoria.

Stress over data leaks

Others are also worried about their personal data. Third year History student Pantelis Antonakakis finds it ‘ridiculous and so upsetting’. “It’s tiring to know that anyone can use my identity and I guess this is one of the reasons I’m always getting spam phone calls. We should demand the university remove our data from wherever it was leaked. If not, we will buy Incogni (a service that helps individuals remove personal data online, ed.) for ourselves.”