NEW YORK – IBM’s cloud-based quantum computing services are currently experiencing a significant and widespread outage, cutting off access for researchers, developers, and commercial partners around the globe. Unlike common outages affecting traditional cloud infrastructure from providers like AWS or Azure, this disruption specifically targets IBM’s advanced quantum systems.

The service interruption prevents users from submitting tasks, known as quantum circuits, to the company’s fleet of quantum processors. The issue was first reported on IBM’s official cloud status page, which confirmed the service disruption for the IBM Quantum platform.

Details of the Quantum Service Disruption

The outage affects the entire IBM Quantum platform, which provides access to some of the world’s most powerful quantum computers. Users attempting to connect to the service to run experiments or process complex algorithms are unable to establish a connection or execute their workloads. Both paying customers on the premium plan and users of the free, public-access tier are impacted by the ongoing service failure. The platform’s user interface and API endpoints are currently unresponsive.

IBM Acknowledges Investigation

IBM has formally acknowledged the problem. The company’s status page notes that engineers are actively investigating the root cause of the outage impacting the quantum services. In their initial statements, IBM has not provided a specific cause for the disruption or an estimated time for restoration of service. The focus of the communication has been on confirming the issue and the ongoing investigation. All other conventional services on the IBM Cloud appear to be operating normally, isolating the problem to the quantum computing division.