Cloud platforms keep breaking down, and this time it’s quantum
First, we heard of – and experienced – an Amazon Web Services outage. Then, Microsoft Azure broke down. But that’s seemingly boring – IBM Cloud is outdoing them all with a quantum computer outage.
IBM, one of the world’s largest IT companies, said on its cloud platform’s website that “the quantum computer, ibm_aachen, is temporarily unavailable within the Qiskit Runtime service.”
The advisory assured that the firm was working to restore the quantum machine to service as soon as possible. However, more than 12 hours later, the issue hasn’t been fixed.
Since IBM’s announcement is very brief, it’s actually unclear what went wrong with the system.
The Qiskit Runtime is a cloud service that allows customers to use its quantum processors, and the Aachen system, installed at IBM’s European Quantum Data Center near the German city of Stuttgart, came online in April 2025.
According to experts, it’s pretty difficult to maintain the superconducting quantum bits, or “qubits,” which are the driving force behind quantum computing, in a stable state. The delicate units can be destabilized into “quantum decoherence” when the temperature changes, for example.
Still, commercial quantum computers typically use lots of shielding and physical protections to keep qubits useful. But that didn’t help IBM.
The consolation for the IBM clients, though, is two-fold. First, the era of quantum computing is just beginning, so early mistakes might well be forgiven.
Besides, the two cloud computing giants, AWS and Microsoft Azure, have been doing much worse lately.
On Wednesday, Microsoft took over eight hours to resolve an outage of its Azure cloud platform that had impacted the tech giant’s suite of productivity software and a range of industries worldwide.
The Microsoft outage followed last week’s disruption at Amazon’s AWS cloud computing platform, which caused global turmoil among thousands of websites and some of the most popular apps, such as Snapchat and Reddit.
The AWS outage was the largest web disruption since last year’s CrowdStrike malfunction, which hobbled technology systems in hospitals, banks, and airports. The situation once again highlighted the vulnerability of the world’s interconnected – and monopolized – technologies.
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