Days after Amazon and Rackspace rebooted their cloud computing servers, IBM has notified customers that its SoftLayer cloud services will also undergo a restart. The reason for the reboot is believed to be related to a vulnerability in the Xen hypervisor.
Many enterprise customers are upset about the news. They complain that IBM gave them only twelve hours to prepare for the reboot, which has the potential to cause downtime for some systems. Others wonder why it is taking IBM so much longer than Amazon and Rackspace to patch the vulnerability when they presumably learned of the problem at the same time.