R&D Team’s Pandemic Battle: Scaling Online Education with Zero Downtime

The pandemic forced the education company to convert all offline courses to an online platform within a ten‑day window, prompting the R&D team to treat the effort as a critical "battle".

Facing an estimated five‑fold increase in concurrent users, the team chose to procure cloud servers instead of expanding physical hardware, rapidly scaling the infrastructure in the Daxing data center and achieving a "zero‑downtime" record for the winter‑break classes.

They developed a comprehensive class‑transfer plan covering scenarios such as switching large or small classes, handling mid‑session migrations, and automating processes to minimize manual effort.

To support nationwide free public courses, an emergency response plan was created, including staged service degradation and user throttling, which successfully kept the system stable during peak usage.

New product releases, such as Group Class 2.0 and a Home‑Teaching Admission Check app, were delivered on tight schedules, often overnight, ensuring teachers could meet quality standards despite hardware shortages.

The team also built a "Same‑City Home" system for dual‑teacher live streams and migrated the offline service hall to an online platform, demonstrating rapid development, iteration, and user‑feedback cycles.

Overall, the R&D group’s coordinated effort across operations, cloud computing, and product management enabled a swift, reliable transition to online education, delivering continuous service without any downtime incidents.