IBM Cloud suffered another significant service disruption on Monday, leaving enterprise customers locked out of critical resources for over two hours, making it the fourth major outage since May.
The latest incident began at 12:59 UTC and lasted two hours and 23 minutes, affecting 27 services across 10 global regions. IBM classified it as a Severity One event — the company’s highest alert level — with customers experiencing “service outages, degraded performance, or inability to access IBM Cloud services,” according to the incident report.
The disruption followed a now-familiar pattern: widespread authentication failures preventing users from accessing the IBM Cloud console, command-line interface, or API. Recovery efforts concluded at 14:09 UTC, with IBM advising affected customers to clear browser caches and retry login attempts, the report added.
Recurring failures signal deeper problems
Monday’s outage represents the latest in a series of authentication-related disruptions that have plagued IBM Cloud throughout 2025. The company experienced similar incidents on May 20 (lasting 2 hours 10 minutes), June 3 (over 14 hours), and June 4 (2 hours 25 minutes), each sharing the characteristic symptom of login failures across multiple regions.
Industry analysts say this pattern reveals fundamental weaknesses in IBM’s control plane architecture — the critical infrastructure layer that manages user access, service orchestration, and system monitoring.
“IBM Cloud’s recurring authentication and login failures are not isolated application-layer events; they are symptoms of a systemic control-plane fragility that undermines the very promise of cloud resilience,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, CEO and chief analyst at Greyhound Research.
The June incidents were particularly severe, with one affecting 54 core services, including Virtual Private Cloud, DNS, identity management, monitoring systems, and crucially, the support portal itself. This left customers unable to file support tickets while their workloads remained technically operational but unmanageable.
Enterprise operations at risk
For enterprise customers, these disruptions create operational chokepoints that extend far beyond temporary inconvenience. Modern businesses rely on continuous deployment pipelines, automated scaling, and real-time monitoring — all dependent on consistent access to cloud management interfaces.
“Any significant outage for a cloud service provider can quickly erode enterprise trust, underscoring that robust, transparent SLAs and demonstrable remediation measures are essential for maintaining credibility,” said Kaustubh K, practice director at Everest Group. “Moreover, unmet service commitments directly affect customer confidence and frequent disruption can prompt reassessment of vendor relationships.”
The timing proves especially challenging given IBM’s market position. According to Statista data, Amazon Web Services commands 30% of the global cloud infrastructure market, and Microsoft Azure holds 21%. In comparison, IBM Cloud struggles to crack 2% market share despite significant investments in hybrid cloud capabilities.
Hybrid cloud strategy under pressure
IBM has staked its cloud future on hybrid architecture, positioning itself as the leader for enterprises needing to integrate on-premises systems with public cloud resources.
However, repeated control plane failures undermine this strategic positioning. “IBM Cloud’s positioning as a hybrid leader assumes an inherent resilience advantage over hyperscalers. Yet the reality is that platform-level control-plane failures in quick succession directly contradict that perception,” Gogia observed.
The analyst noted that hybrid architectures lose their resilience advantage when core governance functions like identity management, DNS, and monitoring systems become globally entangled single points of failure.
New architecture standards needed
Industry experts argue these incidents highlight the need for fundamental changes in how enterprises evaluate cloud providers and design their own systems.
“Recurring control‑plane disruptions highlight architectural fragility in shared platform dependencies. CIOs must insist on regionally segmented IAM, distributed identity gateways, and control‑plane resilience SLAs as requisite components for provider evaluation,” Kaustubh K said.
Gogia recommended that enterprises “procure the control plane with the same rigour as the compute and storage tiers,” demanding documented fault domains, explicit SLAs for console and API responsiveness, and out-of-band administrative access methods.
He advocated for “multi-control-plane architecture, ensuring that a management-layer failure in one provider cannot halt operations across critical workloads”— moving beyond traditional multi-cloud strategies that distribute workloads but leave orchestration concentrated with a single vendor.
Implications for regulated industries
The pattern of failures carries particular significance for regulated sectors like healthcare, financial services, and government, where operational disruptions can trigger compliance reviews and board-level reassessments of vendor relationships.
“Enterprises should bake resilience into their design by implementing dependency mapping, DR automation, and resilient‑by‑design architectures to maintain control‑plane continuity in a multi-cloud era. They must also treat IAM as Tier‑0 infrastructure,” Kaustubh K emphasized.
While Monday’s incident was resolved more quickly than some previous outages, the recurring nature of authentication failures suggests unresolved systemic issues rather than isolated incidents.
IBM has not responded to requests for comment about potential connections between the recent outages or specific measures being implemented to prevent future occurrences.
Source:: Network World