Canvas restored
Update: Friday, May 8, 5:50pm
Canvas has been restored. If you continue to experience issues, clear your cache and cookies in your desktop and mobile browsers, then contact the DoIT Help Desk.
For additional information, including messaging to instructors and students, see also the Campus Alerts page.
Update: Thursday, May 7, 4:18pm
At around 3pm today, May 7, the Universities of Wisconsin Administration and UW–Madison became part of a nationwide Canvas outage. We apologize for the inconvenience.
We are aware of the outage and multiple teams are working with the Universities of Wisconsin Administration to address this issue on behalf of our students.
Please note: If Canvas prompts you to perform any action — such as clicking a link, logging in, resetting your password, or completing any tasks — do not proceed. These prompts may not be legitimate while the system is down. We will send a follow-up notification when Canvas is back online.
The original third-party cybersecurity incident, first reported May 1, affects the cloud-based system operated by Instructure, and affects UW–Madison and all other Universities of Wisconsin (UWs) campuses.
As we know more, we will share it promptly. Thanks for your patience.
What happened
On May 1, 2026, Instructure disclosed a cybersecurity incident that is currently under investigation. Instructure stated that the information involved consists of certain user data — including names, email addresses, student ID numbers and messages among users. The company stated that it has found no evidence that passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers or financial information were involved.
Instructure is still investigating and has not shared specific information with us regarding UW–Madison data included in the third-party cybersecurity incident. However, the UW–Madison instance of Canvas does not contain student ID numbers, dates of birth, government identifiers or financial information.
For the latest official information from Instructure, visit status.instructure.com.
Update: Monday, May 4, 8:30pm
We are happy to report that Turnitin functionality has been restored. Instructure is resubmitting any submissions to Turnitin during this period. The Learn@UW Team has confirmed that we are seeing those move through our instance of Turnitin.
DoIT continues to monitor the nationwide security incident involving Canvas and will share information as we are able.
Update: Monday, May 4, 11am
A nationwide security incident at Instructure, the vendor that operates Canvas, is currently affecting multiple higher education institutions. DoIT has not received notification of direct impacts to UW–Madison data.
The incident prompted vendor-driven technical changes that caused interruptions across several Canvas-integrated tools. Most have resolved, but Turnitin remains partially unavailable. As of Friday, May 1, instructors, TAs and students cannot generate new similarity reports for submitted assignments. We do not have a timeline for resolution from the vendor.
We recognize the difficult timing with end-of-semester activities underway. Current status information is available at outages.doit.wisc.edu. We will update the Outages page as new information becomes available.