I'm sure you're right. Across tens (hundreds?) of thousands of institutions worldwide, each one is exercising its well-written incident runbook that not only gets updated regularly but also is rehearsed constantly, just in case something like this happens. After all, what university IT department DOESN'T prepare obsessively for the moment when they need to restore all grades on all assignments for all courses from backup and fall over to the backup system for final exam administration in any required format specified by any professor, in the second week of May, on a non-negotiable schedule? There's absolutely nothing to worry about here.

Schools don't have competent IT teams.

Here in the Netherlands a data center's power source (not even the machines) burnt down, data center is offline and University of Utrecht, one of the biggest universities here, is closed. Access passes don't work, work from home environment doesn't work, student information system is down, system for grading doesn't work. No failover for any of them (or maybe it was in the same DC?)

https://nos.nl/artikel/2613485-storingen-in-hele-land-door-b...

> Any competent IT team has backups

Backups can be sabotaged (turned off or schedules manipulated) or compromised (say, by lateral movement).

> Even if everything was hosted on Instructure's infrastructure, it's all AWS.

AWS Backup isn't foolproof. Get your hands on administrator credentials as an attacker and suddenly the only thing between everything being gone for good and unrecoverable even for AWS is remembering to have put a permanent deletion protection on all resources in AWS Backup.

Sometimes it is very hard to recover from the offlining of essential systems: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy9pdld4y81o (Jaguar Land Rover, estimated cost in the billions)

I fully agree. What really pisses me off is that these "hacker" groups always spout off how they are doing it to screw the man but then threaten the average person. Millions of them. It just goes to show how uneducated, low-class, and simple these people really are.