BLACKSBURG, Va. – A cyberattack on the education platform Canvas disrupted reading day at Virginia Tech on May 7, affecting more than 8,000 schools — including several in Virginia — and forcing students to navigate finals week without access to course materials, notes, or assignments.
Canvas has since been restored. All final exams scheduled for May 8 have been postponed.
Students make the most of an unexpected break
Reading day at Virginia Tech is traditionally reserved for studying before finals. With Canvas offline, many students found themselves with an unplanned day off.
“Gave me a reason not to study,” said Jake Benn, a VT student. “My reading day kind of went down the drain. Usually used for studying, but I kind of just really didn’t do anything.”
For some, the disruption came as a welcome, if unplanned, reprieve.
“I thought it was perfect timing,” said freshman Abigail Sapon. “I got to pack up all my things. I didn’t think I would have time for that. A lot of stress has been taken off of me.”
Freshman Juliana Cigularova had an exam scheduled for 7:45 that morning and spent the previous day waiting for answers. She later learned all Friday exams were moved to Sunday.
“We grabbed dinner and it was nice cause everyone’s leaving too,” Cigularova said. “We finally got to all get together. No one had to study.”
Senior Thomas Mauck had his own take on a potential silver lining.
“I was kind of hoping that exams would get canceled or like teachers would offer us to just keep our final grades as is,” Mauck said. “I would’ve been fine with that. Go home a little earlier.”
Professors and TAs also felt the disruption
The outage wasn’t limited to students. Senior Sean Fleming, who works as a teaching assistant, said the disruption hit both sides of the classroom.
“It’s also unfortunate for me to have to prepare for that class and not have that material to prepare and test out the finals,” Fleming said. “I know on the back end side that my professor was struggling as well. So it’s not only for students, but professors.”
Fleming added that the shared frustration helped build a sense of community on campus.
“Although it was unfortunate, it was a little come together as a community moment,” he said.
Senior Madison Mulhern said her professor found a workaround quickly. “My teacher just emailed everyone and said just email it to me if it doesn’t work out,” Mulhern said.
Data breach concerns loom over campus
Beyond the academic inconvenience, some students expressed serious concern about the security implications of the attack.
“It was also still concerning when I realized, oh, this could be a giant data breach for literally hundreds of thousands of people,” said sophomore Emilie Verton.
Senior Sydney Peterson echoed that worry.
“I know there’s a lot of data being leaked, which is a little scary — especially with Virginia Tech, a lot of our passwords are the same,” Peterson said.
Freshman Kiersten McEacheron pointed out that this was not Canvas’s first outage at Virginia Tech.
“It shut down last semester. Obviously, it’s a different situation, but the fact that this is the second time that happened — I feel like some change needs to happen somehow,” McEacheron said.
Some students scrambled to adjust
Not every student took the outage in stride. Freshman Jordan Walters said the timing complicated her study plans.
“I couldn’t study for my finals because all my notes were on Canvas,” Walters said. “I feel like I would have been more nervous if my finals were sooner, cause mine are Monday and Tuesday next week.”
Freshman Leila Aguilar had been scheduled to leave campus the same day her exam was affected.
“I was supposed to go home today. So that was definitely an issue,” Aguilar said. “But luckily my professor was able to let me take it this morning. She was so considerate about it.”
Sapon, who had prepared in advance, said the outage cut short work she had already completed.
“I already pre-wrote my essay and everything. I spent all day doing that and then the hacker stopped that,” Sapon said.