During the catastrophic outage in the Amazon web server facilities in October of 2025, many school resources were unavailable.  Schoology, our learning platform was unusable for a whole school day.

This service interruption left people asking which large corporations keep AAPS schools running?

There are many things that come with the corporations having ownership of learning technologies, such as a higher quality of services and management. However, with size, mass outages can happen. That is why it is important for people to know what corporations own the services we operate on.

“Apple, Google, and Amazon are kind of the big ones that own our school programs like Schoology, then we have PowerSchool, and Clever,” says Chad Bertelson, head of IT at Skyline. “When they have issues, it becomes a large problem for the school.”

All these large corporations have control over servers or own services that the school relies on. Out of those companies, Google, PowerSchool, and Apple are the most important.

“If all of PowerSchool went down, that would be pretty bad for our district,” said Bertelson. “What we saw with Amazon mid-October was just a small blip in the district that was able to recover fairly quickly. If Google went down as a whole, that would be pretty bad, but if Apple had issues, I think we’d be able to survive as a district with no problem.”

When the Amazon servers went down in mid-October, many in AAPS were annoyed and irritated.

“I didn’t know at all that Schoology used Amazon servers, and it was really hard to get any work done,” said Adam Repp (‘26).  “I basically did nothing the whole day….it was hard to be productive.”

Amazon is not the only private company that controls AAPS learning platforms.  The owner of Schoology is Powerschool, which is owned by Bain Capital, a private investment firm. According to Powerschool’s website, Bain purchased a majority share of Powerschool for $5.6 billion in 2024. After this acquisition, Powerschool became a private company.