MathWorks — the company behind the widely used MATLAB and Simulink suites — is currently dealing with a massive service outage that has hit its Licensing Center and other online services as a result of a confirmed ransomware attack.
The company announced the cyber event, which started on Sunday, May 18, 2025, and said that the company has engaged federal law enforcement and is utilizing cybersecurity professionals to restore full capabilities.
The attack is severely hindering people’s ability to working with their software licenses, an important factor for MathWorks in both commercial and academic fields who use MathWorks for their products.
Licensing Center (it’s a centralized place for editing old licenses) still isn’t working and that’s a huge PITA. Users have not been able to activate new licenses, update current ones or in some cases even run the software where it’s necessary to verify the license.
MathWorks has been able to fix some of these, such as multi-factor authentication and single sign-on accessibility which were reported as resolved on May 21, but the Licensing Center still remains problematic.
According to reports, users who last logged in on October 11, 2024 are said to have their accounts on lockdown. By the way, the new user and organization suffer from such an error of preventing new account.
Educational institutions and students have been the hardest hit by the disruption, which comes close to the end of the academic year and due dates.
They depend on that for their assignments and thesis that they submit after each term. Although In recent weeks, MATLAB Online and MATLAB Mobile have been reinstated, the continuing licensing issues make it difficult for many to access the environment in a transparent manner.
The ransomware gang behind the attack has not been identified as no one has taken responsibility so far. The lack of response fuels speculation the company may be in negotiations or has already paid off the attackers away from the public eye. MathWorks has not said whether customer or company data have been breached, prompting fears that data could have been put at risk.
The company’s status page is being updated at regular intervals, but some users have voiced dissatisfaction with the lack of information around when the Licensing Center will be back up in full: The episode was a reminder of how ransomware attacks on vital providers of software have grown into a serious risk for businesses, schools and research institutions. Math.Works are advising those impacted to reach out to their support channels while they work toward full recovery of all services.
