Almost every year, the Brazilian Education Ministry’s website goes offline during the Enem — Brazil’s National University Entrance Exam, used as the first stage of the selection process for local public universities, as well as by institutions abroad. That happens as the website reaches peaks of up to 7,000 hits per minute, which overloads the system and makes it unstable.
The federal government’s solution to this was to migrate the subscription structure to a cloud computing system provided by Microsoft. In 2020, the first year with the new strategy, the Education Ministry’s website broke the record of 1.5 million accesses per day. But the site remained up 92 percent of the time.
Microsoft classified the Brazilian example as a success story in its blog. The article was quickly, and proudly, reproduced by President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration. “Multinational technology company gives space to Education Ministry program on its website”, reads the article, published on March 23, 2020, on the ministry’s site.
But there is more to this “success story” than meets the eye.
In exchange for the IT solution, the government handed over to Microsoft data from 1.8 million Brazilian students in the first half of 2020 alone. The terms of the contract were not made public.
“The ministry never thought of building a system that would overcome idleness and host the university databases that are [instead] being delivered to North American platforms,” Sergio Amadeu da Silveira, a researcher in digital networks and information technology from the University of ABC, complained at the time.
The migration of public education systems and structures to big tech companies — especially Google and Microsoft — has become commonplace, not only in Brazil...
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