A cyberattack against Instructure's Canvas learning management system has knocked Greater Houston's largest school districts and several of Texas's biggest universities offline at the worst possible moment of the academic calendar. Final exams in many districts begin Monday.
The list of affected institutions reads like a cross-section of regional education: Houston Independent School District, Conroe ISD, Galveston ISD, Katy ISD, the University of Houston, Rice University and Texas A&M. Other Canvas customers across the country have reported intermittent outages, though the bulk of confirmed disruption has been concentrated in Texas.
Houston ISD has stood up a temporary Google site to host curriculum materials, lecture recordings and study guides while Canvas remains compromised. District spokesperson Keisha Reynolds said in a statement that grading systems are intact, that no student records appear to have been accessed and that exam schedules remain unchanged.
Instructure has not characterised the attack publicly beyond confirming "a security incident" and engaging external incident-response firms. The company's status page reports degraded service across multiple regions; teachers have been advised to download materials to local storage and to host live classes on Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
The University of Houston told students final exam locations and times remain as scheduled, with proctors in some cases reverting to printed exam booklets. Rice's IT office said remote-learning students who depend on Canvas-hosted materials should contact their instructors directly for alternative access.
The disruption arrives in a particularly bruising week for the Houston region. A Friday-night gas-station shooting at a fuel station off the North Freeway left a man in critical condition after a verbal dispute with his son turned physical, and Texas City sheriff's deputies recovered a stolen ballistic vest, an AR-15 and a duty belt taken from a marked patrol vehicle.
Mother's Day weekend weather is expected to compound the disruption, with a cold front pushing through Sunday night bringing thunderstorms and a chance of hail across the northern suburbs. Districts have asked parents to monitor district websites for any closure announcements should outages persist into the school week.