IBM Cloud resets ‘Days Since Last Major Incident’ clock to zero – after just five days

Sixth big outage in seven weeks, this time users were unable to access more than a dozen services

IBM’s Cloud is experiencing another severity-one issue, the rank it uses for incidents that see business-critical systems become unavailable.

“Users may experience connectivity issues when trying to access the listed cloud services” was the explanation offered when the incident kicked off at 1454 UTC on May 25. Resources in Washington DC, Osaka, London, Dallas, Sydney, Tokyo, and Frankfurt were all impacted.

Those cloud services were: App ID; Cloudant NoSQL DB; Code Engine; Continuous Delivery; Toolchain; DNS Services; Event Streams; Hyper Protect Crypto Services; Hyper Protect Virtual Server; Hyper Protect DBaaS; IBM Cloud Shell; IBM Watson Machine Learning; Mobile Foundation; and MQ in IBM Cloud. IBM’s most recent status update available at the time of writing, time-stamped 0241 UTC on May 26, said all but five services were back online.

All clouds have outages. Google had a biggie last weekend when it reported “multiple Google Cloud Products experienced elevated latencies and/or errors due to an issue with Access Control Lists (ACLs) intermittently for a duration of 10 hours and 42 minutes.”

But IBM has now had ten significant issues since April 3, by our count.

The Register has records of severity-one incidents on:

• April 3
• April 20 (when two unrelated issues coincided)
• April 26
• May 20
• May 25

IBM’s cloud has also experienced four severity-two issues in the same span of time.

With IBM betting the business on hybrid cloud, the constant issues with its own cloud can hardly be helping its sales team to convince customers that Big Blue has what it takes to help their businesses advance.

The IT titan is still plugging away, however, yesterday announcing its intention to integrate Ansible Collections and z/OS.

Doing so “will drive resource and service automation for existing and new IBM z/OS applications and workloads from the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform,” IBM says. By doing so, those workloads should be easier to operate in hybrid cloud environments. ®