A big Cloudflare outage knocked lots of online services offline, exposing how dependent modern life is on a small number of cloud providers.
The article uses that disruption to spotlight Coracle, a Cambridge edtech company whose prison learning devices are offline-first—secure Chromebooks pre-loaded with learning content (e.g., Open University, Prisoners’ Education Trust) that work entirely without internet access and are already used across dozens of UK prisons.
Coracle CEO James Tweed argues the outage is a reminder that offline capability isn’t just a prison requirement—it could be a more resilient standard for other settings like schools and hospitals, where learning and essential services shouldn’t stop when connectivity fails.
When the Cloud fails: how offline-first devices could keep education alive
