Monday morning and time for my Duolingo lessons to maintain my level is Spanish and Italian, two languages learned from scratch on the app. 

Suddenly and unusually, the app goes offline. Just a blip, or so I thought. I wash the breakfast dishes and assume in those 5 minutes that the app will come back up. It doesn’t. 

I check the usual suspects. Is my internet down, did I run out of data on my phone? 

The truth, that there had been a very widespread outage affecting not just Duolingo but many other Online Learning Platforms and yet further systems important in people’s lives, including web and mobile services, social media, online banking and more. 

We lead out busy lives trusting that essential online services will function on demand. When they don’t we are paralysed. In the face-to-face education world, technological failures can be very disruptive, but it is much easier to cope, using tried and trusted technologies like the whiteboard, pen and paper and, dare I say it, going to the library to read a book. 

In the online education world, the disruption is far more pervasive and an order of magnitude more difficult to deal with: disrupted lessons, delayed assignments including online examinations, interrupted communication and an inability to access a panoply of online learning resources. 

The chastening experience of this week begs a crucial question: “How can online learning remain uninterrupted when major infrastructure fails?”

1. The Impact of Cloud Downtime on Online Learning

Online learning has grown very strongly over recent years. The use of online in the formal education world now stands at an estimated $200bn and is growing at over 8% a year. 

On top of this there is a very large market for personal learning, of which Duolingo, strongly affected by the recent outage, is a prime example. 

In Duolingo’s case, users were not able to use the app, as all aspects such as lessons, payment for extras, drills and revision all depend on a functioning internet connection. Many organizations which provide academic education and professional training and certification have strongly embraced online systems as a route to extending global reach, bringing in students who either cannot afford on campus education or for whom it is not logistically feasible. 

Online provision has been highly important to many, opening up the prospect of gaining knowledge and qualification previously beyond their reach and allowing them to tailor their learning to their requirements and schedule their study to fit in with what are often many and conflicting demands on their time. These massive benefits depend, however, on a stable and functioning internet. 

When the internet falls over, contact with tutors and access to classes and materials are lost and it can be no simple matter for students or educators to make good the lost time. 

In addition there can be considerable stress and inconvenience, above all for students.

2. Lessons from Duolingo’s Downtime

At the heart of the disruption this week was an over-reliance by many organizations on a single system, Amazon Web Services, which supplies now massive infrastructure on which many organizations run their applications and internet-based services. Much like car companies which found their highly efficient supply systems were extremely fragile during COVID, especially where they relied for critical components on a single supplier, so those providing web-based services have been given a sharp and alarming wake-up call. 

The irony of this is that the web itself was developed as a diverse and decentralised set of systems which would be robust to the failure of any particular part of the net. 

Duolingo have had a painful crash course in the perils of relying on a single cloud system and in not having non-web based back-ups, such as downloadable resources. Without them continuity of learning can be seriously disrupted. Like a mighty Goliath, felled by a shepherd boy called David, many seemingly mighty companies were sent crashing to the ground, albeit for a matter of hours rather than permanently.

3. Tutors Valley’s Resilient Approach

TutorsValley understands these risks very well and addresses them in several key ways, all designed to maintain the continuity and integrity of the educational services it delivers.

It has a scalable digital learning infrastructure, built-in service resilience and a variety of fallback mechanisms which allow services to be maintained in the face of external disruptions. 

TutorsValley also offers offline or low-bandwidth accessibility options, and real-time monitoring to quickly mitigate disruptions. This ensures a smooth path for both tutors and students. 

It also provides the benefit of peace of mind, a boon in our increasingly stressful work. The mental effort can all go where it is needed, on the learning process, not on firefighting or useless worry about how and when things might go wrong.

4. Practical Tips for Online Learning Platforms

Everyone involved in providing services online needs to take heed and learn the lessons of a chaotic day on Monday when systems wobbled badly and some ceased to offer any meaningful functionality to users. 

The experience of TutorsValley and the ways in which it has built resilience into its systems provide practical guidance to other online educators. 

To summarise some key lessons and principles: 

• mitigate over-reliance on single cloud-based systems; 
• use multi-region or hybrid cloud strategies; 
• build offline-ready lesson module; 
• maintain clear communication channels for downtime scenarios, and test and rehearse continuity plans regularly.

5. Future-Proofing Digital Learning

Online learning has been a truly significant benefit of the digital age. The challenge to all who supply such services is to design out avoidable disruptions and build in true resilience. Failure to manage properly continuity for the benefit of our clients will be serious