EU Citrix Cloud users experiencing non-virtual problems starting up their virtual desktops

Using Citrix Cloud in the EU? You might want to consider taking a longer lunchbreak as the virtualisation service is having a bit of a moment.

EU customers using Citrix’s Gateway Service are experiencing what the company describes as “intermittent issues,” and struggling to launch virtual applications or desktops.

Problems were reported by Citrix’s status page at 1044 UTC, with an update more than two hours later saying that engineers were monitoring those pesky “intermittent issues”. One Register reader got in touch to tell us that the wobbles had left a customer with “100s of users unable to login”. Oops.

According to Citrix, the Gateway Service provides a “secure remote access solution” with diverse identity and access management capabilities. The failure looks to be around user authentication, but Citrix aren’t talking. It is also supposed to be “High Availability”, a statement which calls for a new definition of “High”.

Show me the WAN

It has been a difficult few weeks at Citrix, as its much vaunted Citrix SD-WAN 10.1.1 played peek-a-boo following a general availability announcement in September. Microsoft announced the Azure Virtual WAN at the event, and Citrix chimed in with its own cloud connectivity service.

As October draws to a close the service has still yet to make an appearance despite popping up and disappearing again like a nervous meercat.

Eagle-eyed Reg readers reported the tech being announced first on October 7 and again on October 12. Twitter user Rody Kossen excitedly pointed out that yes, official support for Azure’s Virtual WAN had arrived on October 18, only to discover five days later that the pesky meercat, er, Virtual WAN had been pulled once again.

Looks like @citrix pulled 10.1.1 back, download has been removed from the website. No notification why it has been removed.. https://t.co/hqFlx07Gg5

— Rody Kossen (@R_Kossen) October 23, 2018

Citrix customers who have also bought into Microsoft’s cloudy vision would be able to use the functionality to take advantage of the Windows giant’s global high-speed network and of Azure’s large-scale connectivity. If only they could actually download the thing.

It’s all a bit odd, and Citrix have yet to respond to our queries - sent yesterday afternoon - on where the technology has got to. It is possible that the company is trying to ape its buddy Microsoft’s antics with Windows 10 by yanking unlucky software.

Perhaps it had other things on its plate: Citrix published its results for the third quarter ended September 30 yesterday. The company posted revenues of $732m, up 6 per cent on the year-ago $691m, with a net income of $158.85m up 24 per cent from the $126.7m of Q3 2017. The rev uptick was chalked up to subscriptions growth of 37 per cent year on year. GAAP earnings per share was $1.08 and it doled out its first-ever dividend – $0.35/share. ®