Global customers of IBM Cloud reported that their websites went down today, causing some amount of confusion.

The company’s own cloud status page also went down, although in a tweet the company said it was investigating what had happened. “We are aware of reported IBM Cloud outages, we are investigating and service will be restored as soon as possible,” said the tweet.

According to websites that monitor such outages, there was surge of outages after 2:30 p.m. PDT. That affected websites in the U.S., Australia, Japan and parts of South America. It seems some websites are back up now, including the tech news aggregator Techmeme.

Part of the company’s hybrid cloud business unit, IBM Aspera, reported that following the first outages, it had been alerted and was aware that this was affecting all regions. “We have been alerted to a service disruption affecting: IBM AoC Managed Storage,” said Aspera. “Our engineers are currently investigating the incident and will provide updates when more information is available.”

It went on to say that major outages of its AoC Managed Storage had been reported in the cities of Dallas, Toronto, Melbourne, Amsterdam and Frankfurt. There were also major outages of IBM Cloud Transfer Clusters in Washington D.C., Toronto, Montreal, Tokyo, Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Seoul, Chennai, parts of Mexico, Sao Paulo, Lodon, Paris, Oslo, Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Milan.

All that created some confusion since IBM was slow to respond. “Communication in a customer crisis is a must,” tweeted one person. “It was extra frustrating because the status page was unavailable, it took two hours for a single tweet about the issue and Notification Center wasn’t available because IAM was down.”

IBM has said it’s still investigating the issue and it implemented a fix, but hasn’t yet revealed what exactly went wrong. “IBM Cloud services are being restored following a reported outage earlier today,” the company said in its latest tweet. “We are focused on restoring full services as soon as possible.”

Photo: Pete McClymont/Flickr