The hacking group ShinyHunters has claimed responsibility for breaching Instructure, the company behind the widely-used Canvas learning management platform, causing service disruptions and defacing login pages at multiple educational institutions.

Students attempting to access Canvas on Thursday encountered messages from ShinyHunters on their school login pages. The group claimed to have successfully hacked Instructure for a second time and displayed extortion messages on the affected systems.

Instructure had previously confirmed a data breach that impacted student personal information, including names, email addresses, identification numbers, and messages stored on the platform. The latest incident appears to represent an escalation of the group's activities against the educational technology company.

Canvas serves as a primary learning management system for numerous schools and universities, making the disruption particularly significant for students and educators. The platform's outage prevented access to course materials, assignments, and other educational resources stored on the system.

ShinyHunters has previously targeted various organizations with cyberattacks and data breaches. The group's latest actions against Instructure highlight ongoing cybersecurity vulnerabilities in educational technology infrastructure that serves millions of students nationwide.