Salesforce staggers back to feet after global outage

On Wednesday, Salesforce experienced a global outage that lasted for several hours, causing significant delays, intermittent errors, and preventing users from accessing certain services. The SaaS company's status page reported that the disruption affected hundreds of instances across the world, including the USA, Japan, India, the UK, France, and Germany.

The outage began around 0930 BST (0830 UTC) on September 16. Initially, Salesforce acknowledged the issue and stated that it was investigating the root cause. Later, at 1010 BST (0910 UTC), the company revealed that the problem stemmed from requests being delayed while waiting for a response from an internal login service, which was consuming available server resources.

Customers were experiencing severe delays, intermittent errors, and an inability to access some services, including the creation of support cases. Notably, Salesforce's customer base includes major global companies such as Amazon, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and IBM. The timing of the outage was particularly unfortunate, as Salesforce had just kicked off its annual conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco. The event was expected to draw over 40,000 attendees in person and more than 200,000 people online.

In subsequent updates, Salesforce acknowledged that it was no longer pursuing restarts as a means to resolve the issue. The company stated that increased load on a core system component had limited its capacity to process requests. In its latest update at 1227 BST (1127 UTC), Salesforce confirmed that the fix had been successfully validated on a test instance and would now be deployed fleetwide. As of that time, customers were beginning to notice an improvement in service, with the issue gradually being resolved.