Case Study: School District 42 Maple Ridge achieves always-on website resilience during record snowfall with Microsoft Azure

School district’s website handles avalanche of traffic during record snowfall

School District 42 Maple Ridge–Pitt Meadows, which serves 15,000 students across 27 schools near Vancouver, struggled with massive traffic spikes (up to 600% increases) on its on‑premises WordPress sites during snowstorms and other major events, risking slowdowns or crashes that interrupted critical parent communications.

The district migrated its websites to Microsoft Azure—using Azure App Service/Web Apps and Azure Database for MySQL (PaaS)—to enable autoscaling, reduce server management, and simplify disaster recovery. During record snowfall the sites remained up while others failed, eliminating snow‑day panic, improving resiliency, and freeing IT from manual server and replication tasks.

School District 42 Maple Ridge

Matthew Williams

Systems Analyst