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.

The message that students saw this afternoon after logging in to Canvas is as follows:

The University of Minnesota said in an emailed statement to the Daily University administrators are awaiting updates from the vendor and taking additional measures to protect University information.

“The University’s focus is the protection of our students, faculty, and staff information and we are closely monitoring the situation,” University relations said in the statement.

“The University of Minnesota is aware of a recent data incident reported by Instructure, the vendor of Canvas, Parchment, and Parchment digital badges,” the University of Minnesota system outage webpage read. “We are closely monitoring the situation. For the latest information and official updates, please visit https://status.instructure.com/.” 

The message concludes with a link to download a list of the schools that are affected, followed by a link to their personal website. The Daily has not provided nor visited these links. 

Third year University student Oliver planned for Thursday to be a catch-up day for his assignments and a review day for his finals. Because of the breach, Oliver is unable to do his assignments and study — but said he worries deadlines won’t be extended.

“I could care less about the data, honestly,” Oliver said. “It’s mainly just making sure that people or the students aren’t going to get the short end of the stick and either have to have very limited time to do their assignments or not be prepared at all for their exams.”

Oliver is in favor of the University putting “our tuition to good use” by using it to strike a deal with the hackers rather than giving students the short end of the stick.

Freshman Irene Banerjee is worried about her personal data, and less about her exams, as they aren’t near in the future. 

“I feel like if there is really a breach, like that is obviously concerning because that leaks a lot of our information. I didn’t put too much into it, but I feel like I’m not too concerned about it,” Banerjee said. “… I feel like this will pass, it’s not the end of the world.”

Banerjee has finals next Tuesday and Wednesday. Moreover, she said she has many of the study materials saved for her exams. 

For now, Banerjee is not concerned about this threat — beyond her personal data.

“I should still be on track with my studying for finals, but hopefully it gets resolved soon,” Banerjee said.

Oliver chose not to use his last name for cybersecurity concerns.

This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.