on monocultures, institutional agency, and resilience

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sun, 10 May 2026 09:49:11 -0600

Canvas was hacked this week (starting around May 1, so over a week ago now). No details yet, and I’m not going to speculate or make assumptions. My heart goes out to the people at Instructure and the 8,800 institutions who are dealing with this. There are a few lessons from the incident and collective responses:

1. Clear and authentic communication is essential

Instructure’s initial response was to shut down the Canvas LMS and put up a “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance” notice up. Which solved the initial problem of “people can’t access Canvas” but raised more questions. Eventually, word got out that Instructure had somehow been hacked - much of that coming from a message posted by the hackers themselves. Students posted screenshots of the hackers’ message on Reddit etc., and that served as the update for a few days.

Instructure on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

on monocultures, institutional agency, and resilience

1. Clear and authentic communication is essential