By Jennifer Baxter
Hear about students’ response to a Canvas outage, an SGA bill approval that includes over 50 amendments and the success of student entrepreneurs in this week’s newsletter.
UMD, other universities face Canvas outage following nationwide data breach
By Paige Trendell
The University of Maryland’s Enterprise Learning Management System, Canvas, was hacked after a group breached its parent system and educational technology company, Instructure, Thursday.
Students using Canvas received a message from ShinyHunters, a group which surfaced in 2020 and has hacked companies such as Microsoft and AT&T, claiming that they had hacked into the system, at around 4 p.m. on Thursday.
As students went to log into Canvas, they reported on social media that the login page they were brought to varied from the usual one. This could potentially have been a password phishing scam.
An email sent to students by the university at 5:18 p.m. stated that Canvas was unavailable at that time. A message on the Division of Information Technology website said that the university did not know when Canvas will be operational.
Instructure posted updates, and as of Thursday night, the status page stated that Canvas was available for most users.
The hack came at an inconvenient time, as many UMD students are completing important final assignments and studying for exams.
“I have a lot of work to do,” said junior anthropology major Ruby Waters. “I’m happy that I didn’t have anything dire that had to be completed.”
Waters was in class when the hack occurred. She said her class was originally confused, especially due to the fact that the university had not sent any messages out to students.
“I feel like it probably would have been better if they sent something earlier … telling everyone what occurred,” Waters said.
ShinyHunters claim the breach is a result of Instructure not contacting them after they hacked the system earlier this week, according to the Canvas message.
“If any of the schools in the affected list are interested in preventing the release of their data, please consult with a cyber advisory firm and contact us privately at TOX to negotiate a settlement,” the Canvas message said.
All institutions that use Canvas were affected, according to the Division of I.T. Website. The security breach impacted 9,000 schools.
ShinyHunters’ message said that Instructure has until the end of Tuesday to contact the organization.
According to Inside Higher Ed, ShinyHunters wrote a ransom letter to Instructure on May 3 which stated that data leaked would be “several billions of private messages among students and teachers and students and other students involved, containing personal conversations and other [personal identifying information].”
The letter also included the statement “PAY OR LEAK,” but it is unclear the amount of money the group is demanding.
The University of Maryland Division of IT did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Read more here.
SGA approves omnibus bill containing more than 50 bylaw amendments
By Elizabeth Faragi
The University of Maryland Student Government passed a bill 17-1-1 with more than 50 amendments. The bill originally included proposed amendments to restore RollTerps and JusticeUMD candidates from disqualified election tickets, according to SGA documents.
The SGA reviewed its bylaws in an omnibus bill, which contains all proposed amendments to the bylaws in one act, at its last general body meeting of the semester on Wednesday. The bylaws outline the rules and regulations that SGA operates by.
This year’s bill originally included amendments that would alter the results of this year’s SGA elections, however they were informally rejected before the omnibus bill passed.
The SGA proposed amendments to the new bylaws at the April 22 meeting that could restore the JusticeUMD and RollTerps tickets that were previously disqualified.
Legislators voted informally at the April 29 meeting to approve or reject all the proposed amendments in the bill. Through the passing of the omnibus bill, all approved amendments will go into effect.
Legislators at this meeting rejected 11-12-2 an amendment to allow the SGA governing body to fill vacant positions through popular vote if more than half of legislative positions are left vacant due to election disqualifications, according to SGA documents.
Dhruvak Mirani, SGA President, believes that rejecting the election-affecting bylaws was the right decision.
“During the discussions, I told members of the legislature that it would be highly unethical to retroactively modify election rules that the body itself voted to approve, especially considering many incumbents participated in the election,” Mirani said in a statement to Stories Beneath the Shell.
Another amendment, which was retracted Monday night from public SGA documents, proposed that election violations could not disqualify an “otherwise eligible ticket,” according to original documents obtained by Stories Beneath the Shell.
Both amendments would apply retroactively, which means that the previously disqualified JusticeUMD and RollTerps tickets could be reestablished.
UMD’s Graduate Student Government and Resident Hall Association wrote a letter to the SGA on April 28, saying they would cut all ties with SGA if they approved these election bylaws.
Keegan Clements-Housser, GSG president, said he was glad these bylaws were rejected at the April 29 meeting, and that they found it concerning that a number of legislators were open to moving forward with the amendments despite hearing from their leaders that it would be a dangerous move.
“Provided the amendments remain absent from the final omnibus bill, we will be glad to move forward in partnership with SGA without reservation,” Clements-Housser said in a statement.
SGA Vice President Riona Sheikh, Speaker of the Legislature Diego Henriquez and RHA President Emily Shoemaker did not reply to a request to comment.
Read more here.
UMD Pitch Dingman Competition provide student entrepreneurs with a real-world stage
By Michael Murphy
University of Maryland student entrepreneurs earned over $170,000 competing in the 11th annual Pitch Dingman Competition Wednesday.
The Robert H. Smith School of Business through the Dingman-Lamone Center for Entrepreneurship hosted the event.
The Pitch Dingman Competition is open to all students and alumni with small businesses and places contestants into four tracks based on their ventures and whether they are UMD students or alumni. It has distributed over $1 million in seed funding to UMD entrepreneurs since it was founded.
The competition consisted of two elimination rounds before the finals, which took place at the Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center and had three contestants in each track.
The Main Street track, which consists of students with any small business, and the David and Robyn Quattrone Tech Track, eligible for students with scalable software, tech or tech-enabled ventures were the two tracks available for students.
Alumni had a similar setup with the Alumni Main Street Track and Alumni Tech Track.
Marina Merchant-Dest, a senior marketing major and founder of The Finiti, which sells sustainably made women’s tops that she says are designed to last for years, won second place in the Main Street track. She received $8,000 for her business.
Merchant-Dest said her reason for joining the competition was to get over her worries of being on stage, and to challenge herself by doing something she was scared of. She said she gained a lot from competing despite not winning first place.
“You just get to experience so many emotions, and pushing yourself and growing really quickly,” she said.
Merchant-Dest advised students who are considering joining the Pitch Dingman Competition to “just do it.”
A panel of company founders, investors and entrepreneurs judged the competition which included Malcolm Tyson, a venture growth advisor and judge for both alumni tracks.
Tyson spoke about the value of the competition and getting feedback on startup ventures.
“You can’t build your idea in a vacuum,” he said when talking about creating a venture.
After her experience with the competition, Merchant-Dest realized that being an entrepreneur is a possibility for her.
Read more here.
Featured Image: ShinyHunters posted this message on Canvas after breaching the Instructure system that UMD uses on May 7, 2026. Photo courtesy of Emma Bair.