UT San Antonio Delays Fall Semester After Cyberattack Hits Academic Network

The University of Texas at San Antonio has postponed the start of its fall semester after a cyberattack targeted its academic network over the weekend, forcing administrators to delay classes by three days.

Courses originally scheduled to begin on Wednesday, August 19 will now start on Monday, August 24. UT San Antonio, one of the largest universities in Texas with more than 42,000 students, said the attempted intrusion was detected “at the edge of our network, before it reached core systems,” according to Senior Executive Vice President Andrea Marks and Chief Technology Officer Michael Schnabel.

University Technology Solutions, working alongside external incident‑response specialists, moved quickly to contain the activity. Marks and Schnabel said investigators have found no evidence that university data was accessed or stolen, though they did not disclose details about the nature of the attack or who may have been responsible.

As a precaution, the university took several systems offline to review its network and reinforce defenses. That decision caused disruptions across campus, including outages affecting the university phone system and delays with the password‑reset tool. Administrators said the temporary shutdown was necessary to ensure core services were stable before the semester began.

“Starting classes on Monday gives our teams the necessary time to restore services carefully and position our university community for a strong start,” President Taylor Eighmy said. He added that the university acted out of an abundance of caution after detecting unauthorized activity in its technology environment.

The incident comes just months after a major breach of Instructure’s Canvas platform during finals week this past spring, which exposed data tied to millions of students and staff worldwide. Security experts say the UT San Antonio attack underscores how even unsuccessful intrusions can disrupt campus operations.

“Higher education faces a difficult security challenge because universities are built to be open and connected,” said Michael Centrella, Head of Public Policy at SecurityScorecard. He noted that even precautionary shutdowns can ripple across campus, affecting registration, communication, and basic operations. “A university does not have to lose data for a cyber incident to have real consequences.”