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The incidents were different, and that difference matters
The most useful way to understand IBM Cloud outages is by failure domain. A facility or regional failure can isolate workloads in one location. A shared identity or management failure can affect customers in many regions even when their applications continue to run.
| Date | Scope | Publicly identified impact | What remains unconfirmed |
|---|---|---|---|
| May 13–15, 2026 | Amsterdam 03 (AMS03) | Cloud Object Storage, Cloudant, Db2, Kubernetes Service, Block Storage, File Storage for Classic, Cloud Load Balancer, Compute and provider power infrastructure. IBM’s status history labels the infrastructure event “Catastrophic Power Loss.” IBM status history | The initiating electrical fault, precise redundancy failure, customer-by-customer impact and any data-loss outcome are not established by the public entry. |
| June 2–3, 2025 | Global authentication and management impact | Users could not authenticate through the IBM Cloud Console, CLI or API. IBM’s notice says existing applications continued running, while IAM-dependent services and data paths were degraded. The incident ran from 04:05 ET (09:05 UTC) on June 2 to 19:25 ET (23:25 ET; 00:25 UTC on June 3), about 15 hours 20 minutes. IBM support notice | The public notice does not provide a complete technical root-cause analysis. |
| August 11, 2025 | Multiple regions | IBM’s history lists failures involving services in South America, Europe, Asia Pacific and North America, including Cloud Platform, Cloudant, Compute, Cloud Logs, Load Balancer for VPC, Power Virtual Server and Watson services. IBM status history | The retrieved public record does not establish a definitive root cause. |
These records do not support the claim that all IBM Cloud regions or every service failed at once. They show regional infrastructure failure, shared identity failure and broader multi-region disruption as separate risks.
What customers can lose in each failure layer
Application and compute availability
When compute or network infrastructure in a location is unavailable, virtual machines, containers or Kubernetes workers may stop serving traffic. A functioning backend is still unreachable if its load balancer fails.
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Storage and databases
Block or file storage failures can prevent an application from starting, reading data or completing writes. Object storage and managed databases may be unavailable even while unrelated compute remains healthy. Storage unavailability is not proof of data loss; the public AMS03 record does not state whether customer data was lost.
Kubernetes administration
A Kubernetes control-plane problem can prevent deployments, scaling and inspection even if some worker workloads continue running. Recovery plans should therefore include a way to operate the application without assuming the control plane is available.
Identity and management
The June 2025 IAM incident demonstrates a different condition: the data plane may keep serving requests while the control plane and identity plane fail. Operators can lose Console, CLI and API access, and services that require IAM authorization can degrade. A green application dashboard does not prove that administrative recovery is possible.
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Regional outage versus global control-plane outage
A regional infrastructure incident is bounded by a location and the services physically or logically dependent on it. Multi-zone deployment can reduce the effect of some component failures, but it may not protect against loss of an entire region or a regional shared service.
A global identity or management incident can cross geographic boundaries. Applications may continue serving traffic, yet teams cannot scale, rotate credentials, inspect resources or promote a replica. Shared DNS, secrets, certificate, monitoring or support dependencies can create the same practical result.
IBM’s August 2025 entry illustrates a third category: several regions and services can report failures without the entire platform being unavailable. Always identify the affected component, geography and clock used for the duration rather than describing an event simply as “IBM Cloud went down.”
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What IBM publicly discloses
IBM directs customers to its public status page for major incidents. Customers can filter status history by component, geography, date and event type, subscribe to RSS notifications, and retrieve incident reports through the service-health experience. IBM says incident reports remain available for five years; it also notes that incidents limited to a finite set of accounts may not appear publicly. See status and notification guidance and status-history documentation.
A status entry is not necessarily a full root-cause analysis. IBM’s Customer Incident Report guidance explains that broader enterprise-impacting events may receive formal RCA material, while localized events may not. For AMS03, the defensible statement is that IBM’s status history attributes the event to catastrophic power loss; it does not establish the detailed facility sequence or organizational cause.
What to do while an outage is unfolding
- Verify scope. Check the IBM Cloud status history, account-specific notices and your own monitoring. Compare application traffic, DNS, load balancing, storage, IAM, Console, CLI and API symptoms.
- Capture evidence. Record first observed time, error messages, resource IDs, regions, dependency failures and customer impact. Preserve logs and metrics for support, service-level review and a later postmortem.
- Separate local login trouble from an IAM incident. For an isolated login problem, IBM recommends checking the status page, trying a private browser session, clearing cookies and cache, and attempting password recovery: IBM login troubleshooting. Do not repeatedly rotate credentials during a confirmed provider-wide IAM event.
- Avoid destructive changes. Do not restart healthy workloads, delete replicas or alter storage without evidence that the action helps. Recovery activity can create split-brain, duplicate processing or data inconsistency.
- Fail over only to a tested target. Switch traffic when the secondary environment, data state, certificates, secrets and dependencies are known to be healthy. Keep DNS and monitoring access independent of the affected region and identity path.
- Escalate appropriately. Open a support case and request an incident report or RCA when the event and your contract warrant it.
Designing an IBM Cloud workload that can survive the next failure
Use zones and regions deliberately
Deploy across multiple availability zones where the service supports it. For regional-risk workloads, maintain a second IBM Cloud region and keep its infrastructure definitions outside the primary region. IBM describes multizone regions as separate physical locations and distinguishes high availability from disaster recovery: HA addresses ordinary component failures, while DR addresses incidents that exceed the HA design. See IBM’s disaster-recovery documentation.
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Make recovery independent of IAM
- Maintain protected, tested break-glass access.
- Ensure more than one administrator and recovery path exists.
- Document how service-to-service authentication behaves when IAM is unavailable.
- Keep runbooks, infrastructure code and critical contact details outside IBM Cloud.
- Use only the credential caching permitted by your security policy.
Combine replication with backups
In-region replication can reduce routine component risk; cross-region replication can reduce regional recovery time. Neither replaces immutable, point-in-time backups. Replication may copy accidental deletion, corruption or a bad deployment. Define and test recovery-point objectives (RPO) and recovery-time objectives (RTO), and restore into an independently controlled environment.
Remove hidden dependencies
- Host authoritative DNS, external uptime monitoring and incident communications outside the primary region.
- Store deployment state and container artifacts where they remain reachable during a regional event.
- Test loss of a load balancer, storage class, Kubernetes control plane, IAM and an entire region.
- Verify that certificates, secrets, quotas, licenses and network routes are available during promotion.
How IBM’s SLA context should influence decisions
IBM’s DR documentation gives an example in which a prolonged outage affects an entire us-south region and traffic is routed to a backup site. It states that IBM Cloud services deployed over a multizone region typically provide a 99.99% SLA—just over 52.5 minutes of unplanned downtime per year—but eligibility depends on the specific service, architecture, region and contract. An SLA is a contractual availability commitment, not a guarantee of end-to-end business continuity, data integrity or successful failover.
When one IBM Cloud region is not enough
| Strategy | Strength | Cost or risk | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Multizone IBM Cloud | Protects against some localized failures with relatively low complexity. | Does not eliminate regional, global IAM, DNS or customer-configuration dependencies. | Important workloads that can tolerate a regional outage. |
| Second IBM Cloud region | Preserves IBM integrations while reducing regional concentration. | Replication, latency, consistency and operating costs increase. | Organizations with defined regional RTOs and IBM-specific services. |
| Warm standby | Lower cost than active-active and faster than rebuilding from zero. | Promotion must be tested; data may be behind. | Systems with moderate RTO and budget constraints. |
| Active-active | Fast failover and continuous capacity. | Complex traffic routing, data consistency and duplicate processing. | High-value workloads with mature operations. |
| Independent backup provider | Addresses corruption, deletion and ransomware as well as provider failure. | Does not automatically recreate networking, IAM, DNS or application state. | Most organizations that need recoverability without duplicating production. |
| Multi-cloud | Reduces dependence on one provider’s global control plane. | Higher skills, security, networking, tooling and data-transfer costs. | Workloads with strong portability and very high outage costs. |
Infrastructure as code, containers and Kubernetes can improve rebuildability, but they do not automatically solve database replication, secrets, provider-specific APIs, licensing, state storage or DNS failover. Tools such as Terraform should be treated as part of a tested recovery system, not as recovery by themselves.
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A practical decision test
- Can the application serve users if IBM IAM and the Console are unavailable?
- Can operators promote a secondary environment without the primary region?
- Can data be restored independently of replication?
- Can DNS, certificates and monitoring be changed through an external path?
- Are RPO and RTO measured in a recent recovery exercise?
- Does the design meet data-residency, compliance and budget requirements?
- Is the weakest dependency—identity, storage, load balancing, DNS or a managed database—less resilient than the business target?
IBM Cloud may be adequate when its regional, hybrid or regulated-industry capabilities fit the workload and recovery tests demonstrate the required outcome. A second provider is justified when the cost of a shared IBM control-plane or regional failure exceeds the cost and complexity of portability. For many organizations, independent immutable backups, external DNS and monitoring, tested multi-region recovery and emergency-access procedures deliver more practical protection than an immediate full multi-cloud migration.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did the May 2026 IBM Cloud outage affect every region?
No. IBM’s public status history identifies the May 13–15, 2026 event in Amsterdam 03 (AMS03). It does not establish a platform-wide global outage.
Could applications keep running during the June 2025 IAM outage?
IBM’s notice says existing applications continued running, but Console, CLI and API authentication failed and IAM-dependent services and data paths were degraded.
Does cross-region replication guarantee recovery?
No. Replication can preserve availability, but it may copy corruption or deletion and can lag the latest writes. Independent immutable backups and tested restores are also required.
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