Blackbaud went silent last Wednesday, October 29th. Naturally, students attempted to refresh or reboot the page; ironically, it may have been one of the rare times students actually hoped to see the Progress page, only to find it inaccessible.
At Bishop’s, it feels as though a student’s life is displayed and accessed on Blackbaud; students inevitably have grown reliant on the platform. So what exactly happened when Blackbaud went silent?
According to BBC News, thousands of reports of issues surrounding websites supported by Microsoft were made. A widespread Microsoft outage disrupted major websites, including Heathrow, NatWest, Minecraft, and of course, Blackbaud. DNS issues hit the company’s Azure cloud platform — an infrastructure that powers roughly 20% of the global internet.
The disruption exposed the growing fragility of a digital world concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants. Experts warned that this scale of dependence leaves global systems vulnerable.
“We are effectively putting all our eggs in one of three baskets,” cautioned Dr. Saqib Kakvi of Royal Holloway University. Even the Scottish Parliament was forced to suspend business due to the outage.
The Blackbaud portal, relied upon by our school and students, is supported by the same Microsoft Azure technology. What had started as a momentary glitch became a rare pause. This pause seemed to act as a reminder of how intertwined our daily routines are with technology we barely notice until it’s gone.
Teachers and students stared blankly at frozen screens, and the usual rhythm of the day dissolved into a scramble of questions — Is it just me? Was the Wi-Fi down? Mine’s still working! Wait…never mind. As Stella Morera (‘28) mentioned, assignments vanished, homework became a guessing game, and for a few surreal hours, “it felt like life without technology was pure chaos.”
In History and Social Sciences teacher Dr. Charissa Keup and History and Social Sciences teacher Dr. Jeffrey Geoghegan’s (Dr. G) Honors U.S. History (HUSH) classes, many students were taking a timed write on Exam.net, another platform caught in the outage. As the site went down, the periods that hadn’t already taken or submitted the assessment were thrown into immediate turmoil.
Exam.net is already notoriously frustrating as the site does not save students’ work without being submitted; HUSH students panicked with only five minutes left in the period — after working for more than an hour — that their essays would simply disappear. Roman Kapchinsky (‘28) added, “It was so stressful at the moment but Dr G settled us down.”
In Dr. G’s Period 5 HUSH class, he took precautions, going to each student’s desk to take photos of their work, anticipating a moment of destruction at which the essays might be simply erased.
Thankfully enough, he mentioned, “most students were done or close to done by the time I made the announcement about Amazon Web Services being down and I went around and took the pictures.”
Stella (‘28) recounted her mental scramble when she entered Dr. G’s HUSH in Period 6 – after the outage. “I literally walked into class with my plan: outline first, then fill in the details. That plan obviously failed,” she said, still frustrated at the situation. “Suddenly, I had to know every single thing I was going to say before I even put pen to paper. And I write painfully slowly.”
For some students, the consequences of the outage lingered even after class ended. In History and Social Sciences teacher Mr. Matthew Valji’s Western Thought and Culture class, Ben Turner (‘27) explained, “Because Exam.net shut down, I obviously couldn’t submit anything. I couldn’t even leave the tab on my computer.”
While students struggled to salvage their work and adapt to the sudden digital blackout, the experience was no easier for the teachers.
“It was super frustrating because we were supposed to do midterm check-ins in advisory, and I couldn’t access anything,” explained Math Teacher Mr. Jack Feger. “During class, the kids couldn’t access homework, so I had to write it all on the board, and I couldn’t input any grades.”
The outage not only disrupted the students’ workflow, but also upended teachers’ grading schedules and methods of communication – the teaching side of learning is just as dependent on technology and online platforms.
At some point in the day, someone hit “refresh,” and Blackbaud was no longer missed. When the systems finally came back online, life at Bishop’s resumed its normal rhythm – gradebooks had updated, the assignments page swelled with new entries, and the school’s digital heartbeat was revived.
Yet even in that moment of relief, the brief silence left a loud mark. For a few hours, everyone had been forced to slow down, look up, and experience a school day untethered from the usual glow of their screens.
