"One reason for that is that even when working well they're not fault-tolerant, so they can produce errors or just fail to finish a job. Another is that it's hard to maintain a qubit in a stable state. Changes in temperature or an unexpected encounter with a magnetic field can cause "quantum decoherence" - a condition in which it's even harder to maintain a superposition or quantum entanglement, and therefore hard to run any computing workloads."
"Early on Thursday morning, Big Blue advised "The quantum computer, ibm_aachen, is temporarily unavailable within the Qiskit Runtime service." The advisory says IBM is "actively working to restore this quantum computer to service as soon as possible." In April 2025, IBM Germany managing director for R&D David Waller announced the Aachen system had come online in the Big Blue cloud, and gave users the chance to tap "156 qubits of the Heron r2 processor generation.""
The ibm_aachen quantum computer is temporarily unavailable within the Qiskit Runtime service. IBM says it is actively working to restore the system as soon as possible. The Aachen system offers 156 qubits of the Heron r2 processor generation and came online in April 2025 at IBM's cloud. Quantum processors remain finicky because they are not fault-tolerant and can produce errors or fail to finish jobs. Maintaining qubit stability is difficult because temperature changes or magnetic fields can cause quantum decoherence, degrading superposition and entanglement. Commercial installations use shielding and protections, but the Aachen machine at the European Quantum Data Center near Stuttgart still experienced problems. Customers familiar with early-stage quantum tech may tolerate downtime, while classical cloud providers such as Microsoft and AWS also reported outages recently.
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