IBM Cloud stumbles again: second major outage in two weeks

More than an authentication bug?

“Cloud login disruptions—even if short-lived— delay access to key applications, slow internal coordination, and interfere with automated workflows. Cloud outages that affect user login or platform access don’t always trigger immediate chaos—but they introduce friction that compounds quickly,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst and CEO at Greyhound Research.

Gogia said that a multi-region impact suggests more than an authentication bug—it typically points to a shared backend component like a global DNS resolution layer, orchestration controller, or telemetry service. “Unlike compute or storage failures that tend to be localised, control plane weaknesses ripple across zones, making the outage harder to contain and more disruptive to enterprise teams managing distributed workloads. The lack of regional decoupling in core platform functions remains a concern for CIOs navigating compliance, performance, and isolation trade-offs,” Gogia said.

A similar incident occurred just a fortnight earlier, on May 20, lasting two hours and ten minutes. It affected 14 services, including IBM Cloud, Client VPN for VPC, Code Engine, and Kubernetes Service, among others. During this global cloud platform outage, users faced failures when attempting to log in via the user interface (UI), Command Line Interface (CLI), and even API key–based authentication.

When login or IAM services fail, mission-critical workloads can grind to a halt, triggering cascading disruptions across services and regions, said Prabhu Ram, VP for Industry Research Group at CMR. 

Such recurring disruptions underscore the broader implications for enterprise IT strategy, often resulting in enterprises focusing on improving their cloud resilience beyond vendor contracts.

“To attain true resilience, organizations must prioritize robust technical safeguards—such as multi-cloud strategies and geo-distributed architectures, as well as, strong contractual protections, including comprehensive SLAs. While a single outage may not immediately drive change, repeated failures or inadequate incident response can compel enterprises to diversify their cloud providers,” Ram said.