IBM joined the outage club this week after its Aachen quantum cloud service unexpectedly went down.

The outage, first spotted by The Register, saw Qiskit Runtime, the tech giant’s cloud service that lets users access its quantum systems, go down late Wednesday (October 29).

No reason was offered as to what caused the outage, with IBM’s status page displaying the message: “IBM Aachen is currently experiencing an outage within the Qiskit Runtime service. We are actively working to restore this quantum computer to service as soon as possible.”

Aachen was launched back in April. Based in IBM’s Quantum Data Center, south of Stuttgart, Germany, the system has some 156 qubits powered by its Heron r2 processor.

An IBM statement later sent to The Reg said no customer workloads or data were impacted by the outage.

“IBM engineers quickly identified the root cause and are implementing a fix to help prevent recurrence,” the statement reads.

Despite being the pinnacle of computing engineering, quantum systems are just as fallible as classical systems. Since they operate under demanding conditions, such as temperatures near absolute zero in extreme electromagnetic isolation, any potential disturbance can pretty easily take them offline.

Once down, getting a quantum system backup is just as intensive – it’s not just about turning it off and on again. Quantum computers require that aforementioned complex state of requirements to be completely reset while also getting their qubits back to a coherent and synchronized state.

IBM’s quantum downtime came at a time when outages from high-profile cloud vendors are becoming alarmingly frequent.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) saw its US-EAST-1 Region go down following an issue with its DynamoDB service, which ended up taking down a good chunk of the web.

Then, earlier this week, it was the turn of Microsoft Azure to go down, which caused sites across the internet to crash. The root cause of that outage? DNE issues – effectively the same issue that took down AWS.

It was ironic, then, that in the days following AWS’s initial outage, the hyperscaler launched new features to its CloudWatch monitoring tool, allowing it to automatically generate reports on downtime incidents – a feature that would have come in handy days earlier.