I, like many of you, was caught off guard by the massive Canvas outage, caused by a group of hackers who demanded that Instructure pay a ransom to avert the disclosure of millions of users’ personal data. The outage could not have happened at a worse time, as instructors were evaluating final exams and assignments, calculating final grades, and gearing up for summer online courses.
I also witnessed it from the other side: My daughter’s community college and my son’s online high school both use Canvas. For the first time in her life (her words) my daughter had actually completed and submitted her coursework early, so she wasn’t stressed about the outage. My son is in the midst of state testing, and when that wasn’t impacted, he was disappointed. But the level of panic that many students felt, on top of the usual end-of-semester stress, was high.
I also watched the reactions of my friends and colleagues from all over North America in real time across social media (mostly on LinkedIn), but also locally at my own institution. While faculty were stressed and scrambling to reassure our students, there was also quite a lot of, well, not quite schadenfreude, but an expression of a feeling of superiority toward the company itself and the administrators who’d foisted this learning management system on us. Many hoped, and I am sure this will come to pass, that Instructure would get sued, contracts would be broken and the company—along with their LMS—would become a thing of the past. (The latter part I am much less sure of.)
