A professor at Washington University in St. Louis received a panicked email from a student about a final project due at midnight. By the time they got on Zoom, 90 minutes had passed, and they learned that Canvas - the online learning platform used by roughly 40 percent of North American colleges - had been taken down globally by a ransomware attack. The hackers, who previously targeted Google and Ticketmaster, threatened to leak the personal information of 275 million Canvas users unless Instructure, the company behind the software, paid up. So much for "scheduled maintenance."

When Canvas goes down, so does the entire apparatus of modern college: assignments, grading, rubrics, and communication all vanish into the cloud. The professor couldn't even access their own rubric to advise the student on how to maximize the seven hours left before the deadline. They tried emailing students through Workday, the enterprise-resource-planning software that has bled hundreds of millions of dollars from universities, only to discover that the interface was as alien as a Martian landscape. The message was sent more in hope than certainty.

At 9:45 p.m., Canvas flickered back to life, and the professor extended the deadline from midnight to noon. The next morning, the university disabled Canvas again - out of "an abundance of caution," which is code for "we're not sure what's happening either." After a stressful morning of Slack arguments and two-factor authentication codes, the professor finally posted announcements via both Canvas and Workday, redundantly, just in case. Students emailed their work directly, some because their phones had died and they couldn't log in. The professor replied to one, "What a world," and then held their breath, hoping for a moment of human understanding in a system built entirely out of software.