Salesforce Down During Dreamforce 2026: How I Kept Shipping Apex Without an Org
On September 16, 2026 , Salesforce went down. Globally. On day two of Dreamforce . While tens of thousands of people in San Francisco were hearing about AIforce, Agentforce, and Headless 360, customers around the world were staring at login errors and spinning loaders. Developers refreshed the Trust status page. Deployments stalled. Standups turned into "is it just me?" I didn't notice. By the…
On September 16, 2026, Salesforce experienced a widespread outage that coincided with the second day of Dreamforce 2026. Tens of thousands of users worldwide encountered login errors and spinning loaders, causing deployments and standups to stall. Developers, including the reporter, found ways to keep working without an active Salesforce org.
The outage began at 07:50 UTC, affecting hundreds of instances across all regions. Salesforce attributed the issue to requests stalling on an internal login service, which exhausted available capacity. The fix was rolled out in the late morning UTC, but some instances took longer to recover. The reporter utilized a local development loop called Nimbus to continue working on Apex code.
Nimbus allows developers to run, test, and debug Apex code locally, bypassing the need for an active Salesforce org. This approach proved effective during the outage, enabling the reporter to write, test, and refactor all planned Apex code within a few hours. The outage highlighted the significance of local-first development and the limitations of relying solely on Salesforce's infrastructure for development and testing.
To prevent similar issues in the future, the reporter advocates for decoupling the development loop from platform availability, using mutation testing to improve test quality, and incorporating local sandboxes for AI-generated code verification.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
