COLLEGE TOWN, FL — A cyberattack on learning platform Canvas and its parent company Instructure disrupted thousands of colleges nationwide Thursday night. Schools in the Big Bend say the timing of the outage led to limited impacts.
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In Tallahassee, the impact was minimized at Florida State University and Florida A&M University. They wrapped up their spring semesters last week, and summer classes start next week.
The outage had a bigger impact at Tallahassee State College, which started summer courses on Thursday. TSC announced a suspension for online summer courses due to the outage. On Friday, after the issue was resolved, TSC announced classes would resume as normal.
School officials say the timing of the outage led to minimal impacts on student learning.
Dr. Calandra Stringer, the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at TSC, says the school has been working to prepare for future disruptions.
"So we have been working on what we call an academic continuity plan so that we can make sure that we have all of our information downloaded and stored in a different site, so that if anything were to happen again, we can continue with our services as normal. So we do have a backup plan just in case," Stringer said.
Stringer says the impact was minor for students who had started summer classes.
"We had a banner up on our website, so the students will know Canvas is out. Don't panic. Don't be alarmed. We got everything under control, and it was the first day. And so many times, as you know, on the first day of class, it really is going over the syllabus. It really is kind of learning about the class, so there was not a loss of learning happening during this time, which we were very fortunate," Stringer said.
University officials at both FAMU and FSU say they are also developing contingency plans in case something like this happens again.
During the outage, Florida A&M University worked closely with Instructure to monitor developments and assess operational impacts. Services have since been restored.
Florida State University says Canvas is currently available to FSU users, but students should continue monitoring their FSU email for important course and university updates in case of additional outages.
All three schools are using the incident as a learning tool to help teach students about cyber threats and how to respond to them.
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