A Manitoba school division took its own systems offline on purpose this week, and that was the plan working. CBC and CTV News reported on Oct. 30, 2026 that Garden Valley School Division in Winkler attributed network disruptions that began Oct. 25 to a cybersecurity incident, took systems offline as a precaution, and engaged third-party experts.
The division is still assessing whether data was compromised. Going offline voluntarily is a containment decision: it trades normal operations for a smaller blast radius while investigators work out what happened and what was touched.
Offline on purpose beats offline by force.
Education networks carry student records, payroll and classroom systems on infrastructure that rarely gets enterprise budgets. Readiness is what makes a precaution possible: segmented networks so one incident does not reach everything, tested backups that restore without the production network, and continuity steps so teaching continues while systems are down. Divisions that plan this with managed IT support and maintenance decide these moves in advance instead of improvising them mid-incident.
If you run a school or institutional network, rehearse the offline decision now: who orders it, what stays up for safety and communication, and how classes run without the network. Garden Valley shows the value of choosing the shutdown yourself.