According to TheRegister.com, SAP has apologized for the recent outage of its SAP for Me portal, a cloud-based tool that gives customers visibility into their SAP functions, metrics, and services. The portal experienced three outages in the last 90 days, including one incident that lasted nearly 11 hours, leaving customers unable to track support cases, upgrades, or patching work. When SAP for Me was first announced in 2019, the company promised it would provide personalized access and transparent views of customers’ entire product portfolios in real time. The current outage comes as SAP aggressively pushes its RISE with SAP program, introduced in January 2021, which aims to move legacy systems to the cloud and upgrade them to the latest S/4HANA platform. One consultant noted the irony that customers who used to run their own ticketing systems now depend on SAP’s cloud service, which itself keeps going down.
The cloud reliability question
Here’s the thing: SAP wants to be seen as a cloud-first company. They’re pushing everyone toward their RISE program, basically telling customers to trust them with their entire ERP infrastructure. But when your customer portal—the very tool people use to manage their support and services—goes down multiple times in three months, that trust gets pretty shaky. One user put it perfectly: if SAP wants to be seriously considered as a cloud company trusted to run businesses, they need to get the basics right. And right now? They’re struggling.
The bigger picture
This isn’t just about a portal being temporarily unavailable. Think about what happens when companies can’t track their support incidents or manage upgrades. Implementation timelines get thrown off, security patches get delayed, and business operations suffer. Meanwhile, SAP is telling these same customers to abandon their customizations and move to a “clean core” with S/4HANA. There’s a certain irony here—SAP wants customers to standardize and simplify, but can’t keep their own fundamental services running consistently. It makes you wonder: if they can’t maintain a customer portal, how reliable will their core cloud ERP services be?
What happens next?
SAP says they’ve resolved the issue and are monitoring the solution. But that’s what they said after the previous outages too. The real test will be whether they can actually address the root causes and prevent future disruptions. Customers aren’t just looking for apologies—they want to see concrete improvements in reliability. And in today’s environment where industrial and business computing demands 24/7 availability—whether it’s enterprise software or industrial panel PCs that manufacturing operations depend on—downtime simply isn’t acceptable. SAP’s cloud ambitions depend on proving they can deliver the reliability they’re asking customers to bet their businesses on.
