Instructor update: Canvas outage follow-up

The following message was sent to all instructors on May 15, 2026.

Dear instructors,

I’m writing to provide an update on last week’s Canvas outage. Thank you again for your patience and flexibility. I know the disruption created significant difficulties for many and I hope that by extending the grading deadline we were able to slightly alleviate one challenge.

We take this disruption of essential campus services and its impact on you and our students very seriously. We are seeking your input as we work to compile lessons learned and evaluate our campus response efforts. Please consider sharing how, if at all, you altered your final exam plans and/or end of semester experience.

We’d greatly appreciate your input via this Google form in the next two weeks. Your responses will help inform future support resources and response planning.

I also want to briefly share a summary of the events that occurred, and both our immediate and ongoing response efforts:

At around 3 p.m. on Thursday, May 7, the Universities of Wisconsin and UW–Madison became part of a nationwide Canvas outage. We soon learned that the outage was linked to a cyberattack affecting thousands of educational institutions globally. UW-Madison teams worked quickly to respond, disabling all tools and systems connected to Canvas. While awaiting further information from Instructure, Canvas’ parent company, we communicated to all instructors, students and school/college partners early Thursday evening to share initial guidance, including the extension of the grading deadline. Once it was determined safe, Canvas came back online at UW–Madison at about 5:45 p.m. Friday, May 8.

We continue to be in contact with Instructure and peers at other affected universities as we work to better understand the broader impacts and implications of the incident. As I noted above, we’re also working to identify lessons learned to help prevent or reduce the impact of potential future outages.

Again, thank you for the flexibility and coordination that you extended to our students while we worked on restoring the service.

With gratitude,

John Zumbrunnen

Provost