IBM had yet another cloud outage on August 11The incident was the fourth in three monthsOne analyst said the repeated incidents indicate foundational issues and could erode client trust<\/p>\n
IBM probably has some pretty unhappy enterprise customers right now. The company\u2019s cloud service just suffered its fourth outage in three months, an occurrence one analyst said is an indication that structural changes are needed.<\/p>\n
On August 11, IBM\u2019s cloud went down for two and a half hours, with customers \u201cexperiencing failures affecting service availability, performance, and access to core cloud resources.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clients might have shrugged off such a quick blip had they not had to deal with similar outages in May and June as well.<\/p>\n
IBM\u2019s log also recorded outage incidents on May 20, June 2 and June 4, all of which featured login issues and an inability to access key services. In a report<\/a>, IBM said the two incidents in June stemmed from updates made to its cloud Logs service which created a new internal traffic pattern and workload spikes that overwhelmed its Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) system.<\/p>\n David Linthicum, a cloud computing subject matter expert and former Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte, told Fierce the frequent recurrence of these issues indicates a \u201cfoundational\u201d issue in IBM\u2019s architecture.<\/p>\n \u201cThe recurring pattern of authentication failures reveals a fragility in their foundational systems that are essential for managing key functions, including user access, service orchestration, and monitoring,\u201d he said. \u201cIn my opinion, these disruptions highlight critical architectural weaknesses.\u00a0\u00a0It seems to me that their control plane is a single point of failure, and this issue needs to be addressed ASAP.\u201d<\/p>\n Client concerns<\/p>\n To be fair, IBM isn\u2019t the only cloud provider to have outages in 2025. Google Cloud suffered a significant outage in June<\/a> that brought down major third-party internet services. Microsoft\u2019s cloud-based Outlook services had a day-long hiccup<\/a> in July, while Oracle reported<\/a> power issues affecting some of its European regions in April. And AWS\u2019 service history shows a series of blips on the radar<\/a>, though these are mostly related to connectivity, error rates and latency.<\/p>\n But having so many similar outages in a row is not just unusual but also disruptive for clients. As a smaller player attempting to grow against hyperscale competitors, IBM can\u2019t afford to make these kinds of mistakes and provide openings to question its credibility. In Q2 2025, it held a 2% market share in the $99 billion cloud infrastructure market, according to<\/a> Synergy Research Group.<\/p>\n \u201cRepeated outages are a disaster for IBM, considering that they are easily replaced by the larger hyperscalers,\u201d Linthicum noted. \u201cIBM may see that it loses more business from these events than the big three public cloud providers.\u00a0\u00a0For regulated industries such as healthcare and finance, such incidents can lead to significant compliance risks.\u201d<\/p>\n He added that AI will only make reliability a more important feature for cloud customers going forward, with outages bringing the potential for \u201ccatastrophic\u201d impacts on business clients. Why?<\/p>\n \u201cYou may have 100 applications bound to a single AI inference engine, and if that engine is residing on a cloud platform that can provide reliability, it stops everything,\u201d Linthicum said.<\/p>\n Linthicum\u2019s conclusion? IBM needs to tackle structural changes and engage transparently with clients if it wants to maintain any sort of trust and credibility with its enterprise customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IBM had yet another cloud outage on August 11The incident was the fourth in three monthsOne analyst said…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63949,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[282,64,63,281,2575,257,18370,13435,20582,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-63948","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-computing","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-cloud","12":"tag-cloud-computing","13":"tag-computing","14":"tag-fierce-network-homepage","15":"tag-ibm","16":"tag-outage","17":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}