Case Study: School District 42 Maple Ridge achieves resilient, always-on communications with Microsoft Corporation Azure

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

School District 42 Maple Ridge, serving 15,000 students across Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows, struggled with website slowdowns and crashes during major snowstorms as parents repeatedly refreshed pages for updates. Its on-premises WordPress sites couldn’t reliably handle the traffic spikes, putting important communication channels at risk during emergencies.

Microsoft Corporation helped School District 42 migrate its websites to Microsoft Azure, using Azure App Service and Azure Database for MySQL. The cloud setup improved resilience and simplified management, keeping the sites online even during record-breaking snowstorms when other districts’ sites failed; traffic surged by 600% without disruption, and the district also reduced the burden of maintaining its own disaster recovery systems.

School District 42 Maple Ridge

Matthew Williams

Systems Analyst