Oracle Cloud Infrastructure London Region Faces Unexplained Outage Amid Silence from Vendor

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) users in London experienced what many are calling a significant outage last Friday, with multiple reports of systems disappearing and returning with severe performance degradation. Despite mounting evidence from affected customers, Oracle has remained silent on the matter, maintaining its status page showed no incidents during the timeframe in question.

According to multiple Register readers, the problems began around 12:30 PM local time on Friday. One user reported that their Fusion Production system "disappeared for just under 10 minutes, then came back, but was really slow." The issues appeared to affect different environments at different times, with Test environments experiencing freezes and 502 Bad Gateway errors around 1:45 PM.

Oracle Fusion Applications, which were affected by this incident, are enterprise-grade software solutions that handle critical business functions including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM). For organizations relying on these systems, even brief outages can translate to significant operational disruption and potential financial impact.

The incident raises questions about Oracle's transparency practices, particularly given the company's history of downplaying or remaining silent about service disruptions. While Oracle's status page continued to show "No Incidents Reported" throughout the period in question, the volume and consistency of user reports suggest otherwise.

This isn't the first time Oracle has faced criticism for its handling of service issues. In May 2025, OCI experienced another outage in parts of Europe that went unacknowledged on the company's official status page, though third-party monitoring sites like DownDetector showed a surge in user reports. The pattern of maintaining business-as-usual messaging while users experience significant problems has become a point of frustration for many customers.

Oracle's position in the UK cloud market adds another layer of complexity to this situation. While the company trails far behind market leaders AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform in terms of market share, Oracle has secured significant enterprise customers, including institutions that spend millions on the platform. The Bank of England is among the notable organizations using Oracle's cloud services.

In 2022, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison made bold claims about the reliability of the company's cloud infrastructure, stating, "Our cloud is very secure and extremely reliable. It doesn't go down." This outage, whether acknowledged or not, stands in contrast to those assertions and may give potential customers pause when considering Oracle's cloud offerings.

The incident also comes at a time when Oracle is facing various other challenges and controversies. The company recently denied claims of a security breach, though an infosec researcher reported that some customers had confirmed the authenticity of allegedly stolen data containing security keys and encrypted credentials. Additionally, Oracle has been losing interest in some of its open-source projects like MySQL, prompting developers to consider alternative options.

For enterprise customers, the combination of unexplained outages, lack of transparency, and the critical nature of the affected systems creates a challenging situation. Organizations need reliable cloud infrastructure, but they also need vendors who are forthcoming about issues when they occur. The current approach of maintaining a facade of perfect operation while users experience real problems may ultimately prove more damaging to Oracle's reputation than honest acknowledgment of technical difficulties would be.

As cloud computing continues to be integral to business operations across industries, the expectations for transparency and reliability from cloud providers have never been higher. Oracle's handling of this latest incident suggests the company may need to reevaluate its approach to incident communication and customer relations if it hopes to compete more effectively with its larger rivals in the cloud space.

The incident serves as a reminder that even established technology companies can struggle with the complex challenges of maintaining large-scale cloud infrastructure. However, it's the response to these challenges - particularly in terms of communication and transparency - that often defines customer trust and loyalty in the long term.