Wobbly Wednesday whacks IBM as 30 cloud services take unplanned naps

All sorts of services all over the world but IBM says only its console got cross

UPDATED Let’s call it Wobbly Wednesday: 30 services on IBM’s cloud took unplanned naps on June 24th and Big Blue’s offered little or no explanation for the incidents.

A glance at IBM’s cloud status history page reveals the carnage, some of it significantly disruptive.

For example:

• Continuous Delivery went down for 100 minutes around the world.
• Users of the Hyper Protect Crypto Services offering whose workloads run in IBM’s Dallas data centre experienced a nineteen-hour blackout thanks to a power outage;
• LogDNA Indexing users with workloads in Frankfurt copped processing delays for seven hours;
• The IKS container service wobbled and made it hard for customers to manage containers for a dozen hours in Dallas.

The outage reports come from across the world, with the exception of Latin and South America.

Big cloud run lots of services and plenty of them wobble from time to time. But The Register seldom sees so many services in a single cloud have bad days on the same day.

IBM’s social media feeds for its clouds are silent on the incidents. We’ve asked IBM if any underlying issues caused the multiple messes and will update this story if we receive a substantial response.

We and many IBM customers are still waiting for more information on why its entire cloud crashed back on June 9th. Big Blue blamed the outage on a networking provider and we hear whispers that users who invested in direct connections to the IBM cloud weren’t impacted. But no public explanation of the outage has been offered.

Perhaps something will appear at the @IBMsupport Twitter feed, as Big Blue will abandon its current @IBM_CTS account and start sending status updates to the new location as of Friday June 26th. ®

UPDATE: 23:30 GMT June 25th. IBM sent us the following statement: "IBM Cloud experienced a brief interruption to its cloud console on June 23, 2020. No client data or running workloads were impacted. All service has been restored.”

That explanation seems at odds with its error reports that mentioned hours of downtime to many services and a power outage as the cause of one problem.