IBM Cloud experienced a Severity One outage on Monday that left customers unable to access resources.
Big Blue’s incident report states “Customers may experience service outages, degraded performance, or inability to access IBM Cloud services.”
That report starts with an entry time-stamped 12:59 UTC on Monday, a moment at which the company’s engineers were “actively investigating the issue and assessing the scope of impact.”
Those engineers worked fast, because an update at 13:56 UTC revealed IBM had commenced mitigation and was working towards full recovery.
At 14:09 UTC Big Blue reported “significant recovery,” and also offered its first hint about the nature of the incident by advising “Users continuing to experience login issues should clear browser cache and retry.”
Readers may recall that IBM Cloud customers found themselves unable to log in after incidents in May and June. The Register asked IBM if those incidents were linked but did not receive a response.
And now we have another incident with the same symptoms.
This one ended after two hours and 23 minutes of irritation, during which time 10 IBM cloud regions experienced problems and 27 services wobbled.
We’ve asked IBM for comment on the incident, and if it is linked to the prior login problems that also meant users could not access their cloudy resources.
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna’s growth strategy is “maniacal focus on our open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities.”
The company recently reported 21 percent year-over-year growth for its hybrid infrastructure offerings, helped by the recent debut of new mainframe and Power hardware that always bring IBM cyclical revenue surges. Red Hat is roaring and posted 16 percent growth.
IBM Cloud, however, does not feature in analysts’ lists of the world’s top five cloud providers, which typically list AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and Huawei. The latter company is thought to have around four percent market share, meaning IBM Cloud is a low-single-digit player. Maybe these outages have something to do with that. ®