IBM Cloud Falls Flat – Again – in a Symphony of Technical Déjà Vu

Hello everyone. Let’s talk about IBM Cloud – that plucky little corner of the tech universe that manages, time after time, to remind us why it’s not in anyone’s “Top 5 Cloud Providers” list. Monday’s masterpiece? A Severity One outage that knocked customers offline, disrupted 27 services, and even caused 10 regions to start wobbling like a Jenga tower in a hurricane. Two hours and 23 minutes of glorious downtime. Bravo.

The Timeline of Misery

• 12:59 UTC – IBM engineers confirm they’re “investigating the issue” and “assessing the scope.” Translation: someone’s panicking, and nobody knows why it’s broken yet.
• 13:56 UTC – “Mitigation commenced.” The corporate equivalent of popping open the hood of your car, poking at a few wires, and hoping it starts again.
• 14:09 UTC – “Significant recovery” reported. Oh, but if you’re still having trouble? Just clear your browser cache. Apparently, IBM’s answer to infrastructure issues is the same troubleshooting tip your grandma gives when Netflix won’t load.

The best part? This outage feels suspiciously like déjà vu – because we’ve been here before. Rewind to incidents in May and some mysterious “previous month” where logins failed. Same symptoms. Same messy disruption. IBM, of course, offers the classic non-committal “no comment” when asked if these are all one big, happy recurring nightmare.

The Bigger Picture – And It’s Not Pretty

Now, I’ll give credit where it’s due: IBM’s hybrid offerings are apparently doing well, posting a robust 21% year-over-year growth, with Red Hat roaring at 16%. The new shiny hardware cycles are working their usual tricks. But IBM Cloud? They’re not even in the “Top 5,” folks. AWS, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba, and Huawei are laughing from their cloud palaces while IBM is somewhere in the “low-single-digit market share” dungeon, desperately holding out for a rescue from the AI cavalry.

And why would they be further up the chart? If you’re shopping for a reliable cloud provider, outages with “Severity One” stamped on them like a big, red, flashing GAME OVER screen tend to make you look elsewhere. I wouldn’t trust this level of service to back up my old save files, let alone critical enterprise workloads. It’s like going into a raid with a healer who trips over their own keyboard every ten minutes.

The Medicine That’s Needed

As a doctor – yes, the medical kind, not the “Doctor of Feeling” kind – I can tell you this is clearly a chronic condition. IBM Cloud has recurring symptoms, short-term remedy attempts, and an alarming inability to prevent relapse. The prescription? Real preventative care, not the equivalent of prescribing paracetamol for a burst appendix. Also, for the love of uptime, stop telling users to clear their cache. This isn’t WebMD; this is supposed to be world-class cloud infrastructure.

The Conspiracy Angle

If I were feeling particularly conspiratorial (which I am), I’d say there’s something fishy about outages with the exact same symptoms popping up multiple times a year. Either the same component keeps failing, or – and here’s my tinfoil hat moment – IBM just hits the “offline” switch every few months to remind customers to upgrade something they don’t need.

Verdict

Ultimately, this is a bad look for IBM Cloud. If they were an MMO guild, they’d be the one constantly wiping at the same raid boss, insisting “we almost had it that time” while everyone else has moved on to new content. The hybrid and AI segments may be surging ahead, but this cloud division needs serious work before anyone takes it seriously as a major player.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is entirely my opinion.

Source: IBM Cloud hit by Severity One outage with some of the same symptoms from other recent SNAFUs, https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/12/ibm_cloud_severity_one_outage/