Oracle silent over user complaints about OCI London 'wobble' last week

But did it falter? Oracle debuts Schrödinger's cloud

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) users reported an outage late last week in its London region, yet despite complaints from Register readers, Big Red is staying quiet.

There is a philosophical thought experiment: "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Something similar could apply to cloud vendors – if a cloud falls over, but few people use it, has it truly fallen over?

In the case of OCI, something happened on Friday. The company's status page insists everything was hunky dory, and when we approached the company about this story, it declined to comment.

However, Register readers noted that something was amiss from around 1230 local time. One told us, "On Friday our Fusion Production system disappeared for just under 10 minutes, then came back, but was really slow.

"Totally different with our Test environments, they didn't disappear then, but at about 1345, froze and then any attempt at logging in produced a 502 Bad Gateway message."

Oracle Fusion Applications are a suite of applications built on Oracle Cloud and perform Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) functions, among others.

The public cloud is dominated in the UK by the "Big Three" tech giants: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Oracle's cloud trails some way behind - with low single digit percentage market share - though several institutions spend millions on the platform (such as the Bank of England).

In 2022, Oracle bigwig Larry Ellison told financial analysts, "Our cloud is very secure and extremely reliable." He added: "It doesn't go down."

In 2025, OCI denied claims of a security breach. However, an infosec researcher said some customers had confirmed that the allegedly stolen data, which included security keys and encrypted credentials, was genuine.

Shortly after this, OCI experienced an outage in parts of Europe. The vendor's own status page did not acknowledge the incident (and lists "No Incidents Reported" for May 2025), although the DownDetector website noted a surge of reports at the time.

OCI's approach of adopting a "nothing to see here, move along" attitude to issues is nothing new, however, doing so when evidence from multiple sources indicates something was amiss is less than ideal, particularly in a world where transparency is highly prized. ®