IBM Cloud messes up again: Customers sent same warning email 25 times in 40 minutes

Ironically, they’re all advance notice of maintenance that's promised to improve resilience

IBM Cloud is having another challenging day, this time sending customers word of upcoming maintenance work 20 or more times – and even to those who don’t use the services that will soon be patched.

Big Blue’s boo-boo resulted in subscribers receiving 25 copies of the same email in 40 minutes. Ironically, the messages advised of the following maintenance that will take place on June 16 and 17: “With these changes IBM Cloud Infrastructure will be more resilient in the case of unexpected component failures.”

The mailstorm did not go down well.

Same here, this is driving me nuts. Maybe it's a reminder that it's time to look for alternative vendors

— Jason Gill (@jasonlgill) June 2, 2021

I think @IBMcloud is doing some maintenance... weirdly enough, I'm not even a customer... pic.twitter.com/UtdLgNDnks

— Zero Hacks Given (@zero_schism) June 2, 2021

IBM identified the mails as a severity-two incident, the grade below SNAFUs that make critical infrastructure unavailable.

“PayGo customers who have opted to receive maintenance email notifications have received excessive emails during this period,” said IBM’s follow-up notification. “The issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

At least the IBM Cloud remains accessible to users, which hasn’t been the case during the many critical incidents that have hit Big Blue since early April. The latest incident, a 39-minute period during which customers could not log into the IBM cloud, struck on May 31, and impacted subscribers across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Thankfully, IBM's mails come from the address [e-mail], preventing the possibility of a reply-all storm to match the massed maintenance missives. ®