What Happened and Why It Matters
In June 2019, Google Calendar experienced a significant service disruption that left users unable to access their schedules for an extended period. For most individuals, the inconvenience was manageable. For organizations that had built their operational coordination entirely around cloud-based calendaring, the outage created real problems in scheduling meetings, coordinating staff coverage, and communicating time-sensitive information.
This type of event is not dramatic. No data was lost, no systems were permanently compromised. But the disruption illustrated something that business continuity planners have long recognized: single points of failure in operational infrastructure can stop work even when the underlying organization is functioning perfectly well.
Schools face this same exposure. When a district's substitute management system, bell scheduling software, or staff communication platform goes offline, the operational impact can be significant, particularly during high-activity periods such as the start of a school year or state testing windows.
What Business Continuity Planning Actually Covers
Business continuity planning is often associated with catastrophic events: fires, floods, extended power outages. But the discipline is equally concerned with smaller disruptions that can quietly disable key operational functions. A thoughtful continuity plan accounts for technology failures, vendor outages, and the loss of staff who hold critical institutional knowledge.
For schools, continuity planning should identify which digital systems are mission-critical and what the manual fallback looks like for each one. If the student information system is unavailable during a fire drill, can staff still account for every student? If the phone system is down, how does the front office communicate with classrooms? These questions are worth answering before the outage occurs.
The goal is not to build redundancy for every system, which would be cost-prohibitive, but to identify which failures would cause the most operational harm and prioritize fallback procedures for those specific functions.
Building Appropriate Redundancy
Redundancy does not always require a second vendor or an expensive backup system. Sometimes it means printing a weekly schedule and posting it in the main office. Sometimes it means maintaining a binder with emergency contact numbers rather than relying solely on a database. The principle is simple: identify what you need to function and ensure you have at least one way to access that information when your primary method fails.
Schools that have invested in cloud-based communication platforms should periodically test what happens when those platforms are unavailable. Conduct a tabletop exercise where staff assume the email system is down and work through how they would communicate a schedule change, a parent notification, or a substitute assignment. The gaps this exercise reveals are the gaps worth closing.
Staff training is part of this as well. If the principal and one assistant know how the manual process works but everyone else assumes the system will always be available, the redundancy is insufficient. Continuity procedures are only useful if the people who need them know they exist and have practiced using them.
Applying These Lessons to Emergency Operations
Technology plays an increasingly central role in school emergency operations, from mass notification systems to electronic visitor management to digital emergency flip charts. Each of these tools offers genuine value when functioning correctly. Each also creates a dependency that schools should plan around.
Emergency operations plans should specify what staff do when the primary communication system is unavailable. This includes identifying who has authority to make decisions without digital communication tools, how accountability will be maintained using paper-based methods, and how parent reunification will proceed if the electronic roster system is inaccessible.
The Google Calendar outage did not harm anyone. But it is a useful reminder that organizations of all sizes can be temporarily disabled by the failure of tools they have come to treat as permanent infrastructure. Planning around that reality is not pessimistic. It is simply prudent.