Oracle’s cloud has gone down, hard, in its Sydney, Australia region.

The Big Red Cloud first advised customers of an outage at 2129 Sydney time (1229 UTC) on Wednesday, and 29 minutes later wrote to inform customers that the outage had started earlier than its first emailed advisory - at 1015 UTC.

Oracle’s second email delivered the mixed message that: “We are still investigating an issue in the Australia East (Sydney) region that is impacting multiple OCI services. We have identified root cause of service failures and are working to mitigate the issue.”

The snafu took out a swathe of compute and SaaS services, with Kubernetes offerings disrupted, Exadata unavailable, and cloudy networks borked. Oracle has advised the impact of the incident means “some customers may be unable to use or connect to certain OCI services in the region.”

Oracle’s next emailed advice again changed the IT giant's story, this time referring to a “preliminary root cause” and naming that as related to “network connectivity.”

Big Red’s most recent email, dispatched just a few minutes ago, stated the following:

At the time of writing Oracle Cloud’s status page listed 13 services as unavailable, eight as experiencing service disruptions, and seven as operational - including some services that were previously listed as unavailable.

Oracle Australia told The Register it has no comment at this time.

The Register understands Oracle's networking team is most exercised right now as Big Red battles to end the downtime, consistent with the little information Oracle has provided mentioning customers may be unable to reach its cloud and ongoing connectivity issues. Perhaps the carriers connected to the Big Red cloud in Sydney are the source of the problem, rather than Oracle itself. Or perhaps Oracle's own networks aren't in great shape.

Whatever the root cause, hyperscale clouds pride themselves in building sufficient resilience to cope with problems. Those efforts clearly have not worked in this case.

Oracle Australia has told The Register it will provide more info. We’ll update this story once it arrives. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2023/08/30/oracle_cloud_australia_outage/