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IBM’s Cloud just ruined a perfectly good lunchtime by losing power to a few racks in Australia

Reminder: Top-tier clouds promise they’re really good at keeping power on all the time

IBM’s Sydney cloud data centre lost power in “multiple racks” today.

An incident that struck at 11:50 AM local time rolled on until 2:15 PM. Which probably ruined a perfectly good lunch hour for sysadmins and locals who fancied some work-from-home shopping as they brushed crumbs off their keyboards.

“We were offline for hour and a half today”, one IBM cloud user told The Register before bemoaning the fact that IBM’s left hand seemed not to know it had a right hand, never mind what it was doing.

“There was no indication that there was an issue and the support team had no idea.” Indeed, the user received email notification about the outage after it was fixed.

From off-prem to just off: IBM Cloud goes down planet-wide so hard even the status page didn't work

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"We're counting down the days to be able to migrate off IBM Cloud, because we’re sick of paying a premium for an unreliable service and substandard support,” the user told us.

Ouch.

But he does have a point because clouds are supposed to be rather more resilient than this.

The outage happened on the third anniversary of IBM’s planet-wide outage on June 9th and just a week after IBM Australia flicked the switch on POWER servers in its Sydney bit barn. The Register understands the advent of POWER servers is IBM’s big play for business in the region and beyond, as Big Blue seeks to offer users of applications like SAP a cloudier experience.

Oh to be a fly on the webcam during a sales meeting in which IBM tries to make that pitch and is asked what happens if the POWER-packed racks suffer a Total Inability To Supply Usual Power. ®

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