Letter from Steve Daly to Customers
To our Instructure community,
Two weeks ago, I wrote to you with an apology and a promise. I want to follow up today on both.
You asked for details, and we’ve been working to get them to you through one-on-one conversations, webinars, or the Incident Update Page. Our commitment to learning from this experience will not waiver, whether that’s two weeks, two months, or two years.
One of the most important things you’ve made clear is that Canvas is critical infrastructure, and when something disrupts that (especially at the end of the semester), the ripple effects are enormous. Honestly, we knew this at some level, but going through this has made it real in a way it wasn’t before. For learners, their families, and educators, it’s how effective teaching happens, how institutions operate smoothly, and how learning gets documented and delivered to the student. It’s a huge responsibility, one that we cannot take lightly.
As the leader in this space, our responsibility goes beyond a 'lessons learned' session or our own remediation. We have an obligation to help make the industry stronger.
The threats facing academic institutions and education technology providers aren’t going away. No single platform can build a resilient ecosystem alone, but I believe we can as a community. We’re already in conversations with government leaders, technology and integration partners, and institutions about how we can collectively build something stronger, together. As part of that, we are organizing an Advisory Board focused on security and resilience, led by our Chief Academic Officer, Melissa Loble. The goals are to develop a clear playbook for how we collectively secure our environments and, should something happen that affects system availability, have a redundant ecosystem that our community can rely on. We don’t have to work on these challenges alone, together we can build an ecosystem that learners and their families can have confidence in.
We don’t have all the answers yet, but I am confident that something good will come out of this incident. If your institution wants to be part of that conversation, we want to hear from you and sincerely appreciate your support.
We also want to acknowledge that our initial response during this incident added to what was already a challenging situation, and for that, we are truly sorry. We’re doing a comprehensive review of how we respond to any event that affects availability, because we understand how much that matters. We will consult and update you on the changes resulting from that analysis.
Before I close, we’re now doing the detailed data breakdown, taking the broader field findings we shared earlier this week and parsing them by institution. While we don’t know how long this work will take, it will be measured in weeks and months, not days. Conducting our data analysis with speed is the primary goal, but of course, accuracy is equally important to us. We will continue to keep our Incident page updated with the latest.
Finally, I want to thank you for the grace you’ve shown us over the past two weeks. It says a lot about who you are as a community, a community we are so very grateful to be a part of!
Steve Daly, CEO, Instructure
