School Continuity and Distance Learning during COVID-19 closures

Whilst we, along with schools, work to meet the challenges of distance learning and continuity of teaching, it will be more important than ever to communicate regularly.

 With this in mind, we will be sharing all of our ongoing messages and communications here in the Help Centre, as well as our usual channels of email and our website.

20th April: Service update - Firefly Australia platform fully accessible again — Simon and I would like to thank you for your patience and understanding during the morning on Monday, when some Australian schools were unable to access Firefly’s platform, and system response times were slower than expected. We know that the service level is below the standards we set ourselves.
27th March: Good News Update and Next Steps — What a week - Let’s #KeepLearningGoing
24th March: Service Update - 6.30pm - Platform fully accessible again — We’re ever so sorry to have caused additional stress today at what we know is already a very difficult time. Demand continued to be off the charts (about 5,000 requests a second) in the morning “rush hour”. We had hoped that the changes we made last night, increasing our infrastructure to over 16x our usual capacity, would do the trick, but encountered separate problems this morning with a different part of the system that only appeared as a result of the increased scale elsewhere (Redis, for the techies among you, which we use to share sessions across our web server pool). Once we had that back online this afternoon – re-architected and hugely scaled up – we saw knock-on effects of the over-provisioning causing some of our web servers to hit limits on how many things they could connect to at once. This caused about 5% of requests to fail throughout the early afternoon, affecting in particular Office 365 logins.
23rd March: Firefly learning continuity preparedness update and scheduled maintenance — We appreciate that today has been a challenging day for many students, parents, teachers and school leaders as we collectively face the “new normal” of distance learning with school closures globally.