Sources: IBM's company-wide email migration, 18 months in the making, has left many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events for several days
IBM's planned company-wide email migration has gone off the rails, leaving many employees unable to use email or schedule calendar events. Tweets: @markham , @jalajboy , @kebelledonne , @benedictevans , @chrisfralic , @chuff_sf , @stevekovach , @jackbrewster , @mohamed , @film_girl , @cedfunches , @chingedyching , @darth , @achis , @quinnypig , @yeetguru , and @leyrer Tweets: @markham : Big migrations are hard. But email/calendars are mission-critical for most people. That @SlackHQ is still up for IBMers is notable. 👀 https://twitter.com/... Arvind Jha / @jalajboy : 18 months for email migration - guess the number of meetings and committees needed to screw this up!! Now you know why IBM lost out on the enterprise software play. They still dominate mainframes though. https://twitter.com/... @kebelledonne : When I worked there 20 years ago, that was every day using Lotus Notes. Legit had a manager who printed out every single email & calendar entry and kept them in a binder because the access was so screwy https://twitter.com/... Benedict Evans / @benedictevans : Can't Watson just tell them all what to do? https://twitter.com/... Chris Fralic / @chrisfralic : “Watson, is it time for us to move off of Lotus Notes?” https://twitter.com/... @chuff_sf : Just imagine being one of the great-grandparents of the tech world and screwing up one of the oldest “modern” tech tools there are. And possibly because of cost-cutting. You do NOT cut costs on a basic pillar of work, otherwise shit like this happens. https://twitter.com/... Steve Kovach / @stevekovach : Congrats IBM employees.... You're free! https://twitter.com/... Jack Brewster / @jackbrewster : I guess IBM is too big to mail. https://twitter.com/... Mohamed Nanabhay / @mohamed : Now they know what everyone else stuck using Notes has always known.... https://twitter.com/... Christina Warren / @film_girl : I swear I'm not laughing. Mostly b/c I don't want to jinx anything. (Plz don't die Exchange Online...we need you) https://twitter.com/... @cedfunches : Sounds like a perk to me https://twitter.com/... Emily Ching / @chingedyching : Sounds good to me. Maybe my employer should hire them to design a pay system.... https://twitter.com/... @darth : ok but what is the downside IBM https://twitter.com/... Andy / @achis : all of the good program managers and mail migration people must have been over 45 https://twitter.com/... Corey Quinn / @quinnypig : I was just talking last night on Spaces about large company email systems so this is probably my fault somehow. https://twitter.com/... Yeeter / @yeetguru : Same company that sells you data and ai solutions can't modernize/migrate their email system🤣🤣 https://twitter.com/... Martin Leyrer / @leyrer : <3 @TheRegister :D “Minutes after this article was published, an IBM spokesperson dictated the company's statement over the phone, presumably because email is a bit spotty...” https://www.theregister.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This lands at a bad moment for IBM's execution story. Weeks after this outage, current and former insiders detailed IBM's missteps with Watson and its retreat to a narrower commercial pitch, and later reporting found the company's AI couldn't deliver on CEO Arvind Krishna's commitment to replace ~7,800 staff — with some people who could fix it already gone.
An 18-month migration of the most basic corporate tooling going sideways matters more at IBM than elsewhere: the entity list still carries Lotus Notes, the collaboration platform IBM built its enterprise franchise on, and observers noted the irony that Slack stayed up while IBMers' own email didn't.
First-order effects
- Thousands of IBMers lost email and calendar scheduling for several days mid-migration — the two functions most corporate work depends on — with no fallback except third-party tools like Slack that remained available.
Second-order effects
- Every enterprise customer evaluating IBM for collaboration or infrastructure modernization now has a fresh, quotable counterexample: the vendor pitching large-scale IT transformation visibly stumbled on its own 18-month rollout.
Third-order effects
- Read alongside the Watson retreat and the unmet AI-replacement commitment, this fits a pattern where IBM's announced ambitions outrun its delivery capacity — raising the question of whether internal execution gaps become a structural drag on how buyers weigh its enterprise pitches.
The trend: Big-company IT modernization programs are increasingly judged by whether vendors can run their own infrastructure — and IBM keeps supplying public evidence that it can't always close that gap.