Resiliency in School Connectivity – A Lesson from Cloudflare

[SEGfL_Krista]

The Cloudflare outage on 18th November, caused by a configuration error, disrupted services globally.

t’s a reminder of how dependent we are on a few providers and why resiliency must be part of every school’s digital strategy.

BBC Report: Cloudflare apologises for outage which took down X and ChatGPT - BBC News

How are schools planning for connectivity failures?

• Backup connections?
• Failover solutions?
• Role of MATs and service providers?

Would be great to hear what approaches others are taking.

 

[msi_school]

The DfE Guidance now recomends a backup internet connection which is good advice however, it can be difficult to get two connections which do not have the same bottle necks especailly in the last mile.

 

Any back up connection however redudant however, will not fix the Cloudflare or AWS-East issues. In both these cases the connection to the internet was not the problem the sites them selves where down.

 

There is no technical solution to this, schools need to have a process to replace any affeced process with a seperate solution, ideally off line as this will allow the school to operate in situations of cyber attack, internet outage, or power cut as well as these issues caused by the internet becoming more depandant on a small number of centeralised suppliers.

Edited November 20, 2025 by msi_school
spelling

[psydii]

Our isp has had about 10 hours of downtime in the last  14 years (LGfL).

We have a physical redundant link via 3rd party infrastructure back to the LGFL 'core'

We also have a battery-backed  5g mi-fi router in the front office grab bag and key staff can get internet access and pivot to Teams Phone System if we (say) loose access to the site or we have an extended VOIP Platform outage.

 

On cloud outages.. well its a very bad day if 365/Entra are unavailable, however staff and student devices cache recently  used files, and we have seating plans and local AD, so we are partially insulated with respect to logging on and getting access to files folders and existing emails.

 

On the MIS side - diversity is actually in our Business Continuity plan.  Everything syncs back to  local sims, but only a handful of people actually depend on sims on a daily basis. 3rd Parties add-ons are king, and they tend to be on diverse clouds themselves so even if one of the big cloud infrastructure providers are 'down' we still have access to critical data.

 

And for what its worth, it takes about a day to bring up AD SIMS and the Cashless Catering System from backup to  alternative offsite "server infrastructure"*. restoring a server to the existing infrastructure takes minutes (apart from that 6TB monster - but that's archival these days)

 

 

*a beefy pc running hyper-v on a domestic 150/150 line,  to occasionally prove it can be done. We all test our bare-metal DR plans, right?

[machy]

I Think Having a secure paper backup of all student contact details & some paper registers should solve 95% of the short term "we need to keep the school open" issues resulting from a total loss of IT infrastructure to a site (and it seems most MIS' go down enough to be able to war game it in a low stakes scenario). and is a rounding error in cost to implement, say 20 mins of time and £5 in printing a term.

 

Teachers are supposed to be trained professionals so should be able to cope with not having IT Access. 

 

 

[GK1999]

2 minutes ago, machy said:

I Think Having a secure paper backup of all student contact details & some paper registers should solve 95% of the short term "we need to keep the school open" issues resulting from a total loss of IT infrastructure to a site (and it seems most MIS' go down enough to be able to war game it in a low stakes scenario). and is a rounding error in cost to implement, say 20 mins of time and £5 in printing a term.

 

Teachers are supposed to be trained professionals so should be able to cope with not having IT Access. 

 

 

Couldn't have said it better myself. 

 

In our school our teachers are trained for sure, in what I have no clue... 

[Andrew_C]

It may be the case that SOME (maybe most) lessons could pivot to an ITless world without too much trouble.  However, teachers have been told for years not to print stuff, and that they don't need local printer.  Some lessons (DT & science in particular) REQUIRE data, IT dependant equipment, etc.  Due to constraints in timetables and curriculum, losing the lessons is a real problem.