A cyberattack on Instructure’s Canvas locked out thousands of students and disrupted final-exam workflows, affecting nearly 9,000 schools and education institutions worldwide. For some campuses, including portions of the University of Illinois system, IT teams paused coursework, extended deadlines, and implemented improvised alternatives while investigating the incident. The breach highlighted the sector’s structural reliance on a small number of centralized digital learning vendors that effectively operate as infrastructure. Even when institutions maintain their own systems, the course-delivery layer is often concentrated—raising the operational risk when that layer fails. The reporting emphasizes that the immediate damage wasn’t limited to access: it required rapid instructional triage under time pressure, with implications for student equity, assessment continuity, and future vendor-risk management.