Verizon Cloud will be down for maintenance for up to 48 hours next weekend and virtual machines hosted there will be inoperable, all to enable the introduction of unnamed improvements.

At the time of writing, Verizon's Cloud Client Care page does not mention the outage, but users have emitted Tweets (such as the one below) in which they express a little incredulity about the need for the temporary shutdown.

The Reg asked Verizon to confirm the outage and it responded by sending us following statement:

In a long and testy thread following the Tweet we've embedded above, a number of users and commentators wonder if it is acceptable to take a cloud down for even a few minutes, never mind at least 24 hours.

Verizon acquired its cloud from Terremark back in 2011 and has since outlined plans to build its own platform based on Xen and CloudStack.

That its rig requires 24 hours or more of maintenance is at odds with cloud vendors' usual approach of effortless upgrade, downtime in tiny doses and lots of snappy patter about agility and letting IT staff innovate instead of being stuck keeping the lights on.

Perhaps Verizon's new features will deliver that experience. For now, the company's delivering an oddity that's got chins wagging.

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Get off of my Cloud Verizon tells users ahead of 48-hour maintenance outage