A system that thousands of schools and universities in the US use was offline on Thursday during a cyber-attack , creating chaos as students tried to study for finals and underscoring education’s dependence on technology. Students quickly took to social media to ask if others were unable to access Canvas, with many panicking that they could no longer view course materials housed within the platform to study for their final exams. Universities and school districts quickly began notifying students and parents. Some schools, such as the University of Texas at San Antonio, announced they were pushing back finals scheduled for Friday in response to the outage. “This is being reported as a national-level cyber-security incident,” wrote the director of information technology at the University of Iowa’s College of Public Health when announcing that the school’s online system was down.…