UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE
The Highlander For the week of Tuesday, May 12, 2026
VOL. 74, ISSUE 27
est. 1954
The 49th UC Riverside Writer’s Week unfolds A plethora of distinguished writers share works and tricks of the trade. IAN PALMA, JIHOON KWON News Editor, Staff Writer
JOSE DEL ANGEL / THE HIGHLANDER
UC Riverside’s suffers one of its most devastating software hijackings
Students are unable to access class materials for days due to a ShinyHunters cyber attack on Canvas’s parent company Instructure. JOSÉ DEL ÁNGEL News Editor
The University of California, Riverside (UCR) restored access to its Canvas learning management system on Saturday, May 9, 2026, after a two-day shutdown caused by a cybersecurity incident affecting colleges and universities across the country The disruption began May 1, 2026, when Instructure, the company behind Canvas, disclosed that a threat actor had gained unauthorized access to part of its environment. The incident affected thousands of higher education institutions nationwide, including the University of California (UC) system. University officials said Canvas access was restored on Saturday at 1:35 p.m. following a security assessment conducted by a third-party cybersecurity vendor and reviewed by the UC Office of the President and campus chief information security officers. “Canvas access has been restored following a security assessment of the system,” UCR Information Technology Solutions (ITS) said in a campus update. “Students and faculty may now resume instructional activities in Canvas by logging into the central authentication system with their UCR NetID and using Duo multi-factor authentication.” The university had disabled local access to Canvas earlier in the week while security officials investigated the scope of the incident. During the outage, students and faculty experienced interruptions to coursework, assignments and communication as instructors sought alternative ways to continue classes. UCR officials urged students to continue attending regularly scheduled classes despite the disruption. The university anticipated restoring access by Monday, May 11, but completed the process earlier after receiving approval from UC leadership and cybersecurity reviewers. Instructure CEO Steve Daly issued a public apology Thursday May 7, 2026, acknowledging frustration among users over limited communication during the incident, “Many of you dealt with real disruption,” Daly said in a statement. “You deserve more consistent communication from us, and we didn’t deliver it. According to Instructure, the breach involved unauthorized access to certain user information, including usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages. The
ALEXANDER WONG / THE HIGHLANDER
From May 5 to 8, 2026, the University of California Riverside’s (UCR) department of creative writing hosted its 49th UCR Writers Week Festival, California’s longest running free literary festival. Hosted by the Department of Creative Writing, the event saw dominating literary figures share works, experiences and advice all the while displaying some of the works of some of the students at UCR. Tuesday The event began at 11 p.m. with Caro De Robertis’s reading of their 2019 novel “Cantoras.” The novel is set during the dictatorship in Uruguay during the 1970s and captures the experiences of real queer women who turn to each other for “community, love, sex, drama and survival.” De Robertis encountered these women in her 20s after having been disowned by their parents for their gender identity. Having been told that they “couldn’t be both gay and Uruguayan,” De Robertis found deep personal connection with the stories of these women who would go to the beach with no running water or electricity, but also no surveillance from the regime. Upon extensive research for another book they had been working on, De Robertis realized that there was zero documentation of what it was like to be LGBTQ+ under the dictatorship despite her having heard the stories of the women years ago. De Robertis then proceeded to read from their most recent novel, “The Palace of Eros.” This is the first book they’ve written that does not take place in Latin America, but De Robertis aimed to bring a cultural lens as a Latinx writer regardless. They also explore themes of queerness which they recognize as something timeless and universal, whether it is dictatorship in Uruguay during the 1970s or Ancient Greece, yet always have faced systematic erasure. Lastly, she read excerpts from her first creative nonfiction book “So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary,
► SEE CANVAS HIJACKING ON PAGE 5
► SEE WRITERS WEEK ON PAGE 18
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