IBM is remaining coy about a global outage that saw customers cut off from Big Blue’s cloud service in an outage last week.
The problems, which began around 8am AEST, lasted around four hours and saw IBM’s own services down along with customers in the US, Japan and Australia.
Along with its own status pages, the outage affected other services including the company’s VPN products, App Connect, Identity and Access Management (IAM), Continuous Delivery and Watson AI.
Following the disruption, an IBM status update stated “a detailed root cause analysis is underway. An investigation shows an external network provider flooded the IBM Cloud network with incorrect routing, resulting in severe congestion of traffic and impacting IBM Cloud services and our data centers. Mitigation steps have been taken to prevent a reoccurrence. Root cause analysis has not identified any data loss or cybersecurity issues.”
Six days later, IBM is yet to elaborate on the identity of the third party, however the outage is an embarrassment for the company which in recent times has staked its future on cloud capabilities and AI services.
Last year, IBM’s then Chief Executive Officer, Ginni Rometti, wrote of the transition, “in 2013, cloud represented only 4 percent of IBM’s revenue. Today, cloud is 27 percent — a $21.2 billion business — and growing rapidly. In the past year, we’ve substantially enhanced our public cloud offerings, including dramatic improvements in ease of use, 99.999% availability and the strongest security posture in the industry.
A year earlier, IBM claimed 47 of the 50 biggest US corporations were signed up to their cloud services, however industry analysts Gartner estimated that IBM’s share in 2018 was only 1.8% of the global market.
In that letter, Rometti also announced she would retire at the end of 2020 after nearly 40 years with the company and Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President for Cloud and Cognitive, took over as CEO in April.
