IBM Cloud login breaks for second time in a fortnight

Sev-1 incident downs support portals and means application data paths ‘may be affected’

IBM’s Cloud has experienced a second Severity One incident in a fortnight. Both meant users could not log in to the Big Blue Cloud, and therefore were prevented from controlling or creating resources.

The first incident occurred on May 21 and impacted 15 products, including IBM’s Kubernetes service, Object Storage, and DNS. IBM warned users that the incident meant attempts to log in through its web interface, command line interface, and API may fail. The outage lasted for two hours and ten minutes.

The second incident struck on Monday, June 2, and impacted 41 products including IBM’s Virtual Private Cloud Service, the cloudy AI Assistant, and databases.

An email sent to customers, and seen by The Register, includes the following advice:

Users are unable to login to IBM Cloud and will be unable to manage or provision cloud resources.

• Users will experience failures with IAM authentication;
• Users will be unable to access the support portal for opening or viewing support cases;
• Customer application data path may be affected.

IBM’s status update report contains conflicting information about the incident. One field of the report contains timestamps that indicate the problem is fourteen hours old at the time of writing – a timeline supported by ten-hour old social media posts in which IBM customers complain of being unable to access their cloudy resources.

However the report also details remediation steps across five hours of time.

The incident ended at 11:10 PM UTC on June 2nd (4:10 PM PT). The Register has asked IBM if the two incidents are related and for any details on the cause of the outages and will update this story if we receive a substantive response. ®