European customers report Oracle Cloud identity outage, Big Red is silent

DownDetector reported problems for about 6 hours

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) experienced an outage in Europe earlier today, according to users and online metrics.

The Register understands that OCI's identity platform was down in parts of Europe around 0700 UTC this morning, even though Big Red's official status page did not acknowledge the issue.

The Downdetector website, which records and confirms outage reports, received a surge in reports of an OCI outage after 0800 UTC, peaking at 111 reports at about 0830 UTC, and continued to show reported problems through about 1400 UTC.

The Register understands that at least the Germany Central (Frankfurt) region was affected, and attempts to failover to the Netherlands Northwest (Amsterdam) were not successful.

Oracle did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last month, Big Red denied then admitted that its cloud security was compromised by a cyberattack.

Although Oracle publicly said "there has been no breach of Oracle Cloud," it later spoke to at least two customers about the fallout of the security lapse.

Oracle later wrote to customers alerting them about an intrusion into part of its public cloud empire, but maintained that OCI was untouched. Security experts reacted with a mix of ridicule and outrage.

The database giant pedantically argued it was just Oracle Cloud Classic affected by the intrusion, an earlier but still active generation of Oracle's cloud offering. It seems an attacker accessed and published user names from two obsolete servers that were not part of OCI.

The problem was serious enough to attract the attention of the US government's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which issued an alert. In mid-April, it advised Oracle users to make sure, in light of that theft, they were not embedding credentials potentially stolen from a login server into software and cloud resources. ®