Maricopa Community Colleges cancel classes amid cybersecurity issue

PHOENIX — The Maricopa County Community College District announced Friday it has canceled classes until March 29 after a cybersecurity issue forced its network system offline.

In a statement on its website, the district said the network outage was due to suspicious activity that appears to be related to a potential cyber attack.

“We are treating this matter with the highest priority,” the statement said. “As part of our response process, we engaged key partners, including independent forensic specialists, who are working to help us investigate and resolve the outage.”

Important Update: Class instruction, for all modalities, will resume on March 29, 2021 (by individual exception some clinicals will resume as scheduled).

Please continue to visit our website for messages and timely updates: https://t.co/dQ2kqi7vwI pic.twitter.com/pa61H0QXiz

— Maricopa Community Colleges (@mcccd) March 20, 2021

The network has been offline since Tuesday and has affected student and faculty access to MyInfo, Canvas, RioLearn, Maricopa email, Google Tools and the Student Information System.

The semester will be extended one week to May 22 to make up for the lost time, the district said.

School officials are unsure of when the network will be online again.

No further information was made available as an investigation is ongoing.

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