Salesforce.com Knocked Offline

By Greg McNevin

January 8, 2009: A Salesforce.com service outage has shown that cloud services cannot protect companies from a little rain every now and then, with the customer relationship management (CRM) specialist’s applications being unreachable for 900,000 for almost an hour this week.

Beginning at noon California time on the 6th of January, the fault affected all of the Software-as-a-Service pioneer’s offerings, with users either not being able to access their accounts at all or receiving an error message.

While the timing of the outage meant US customers were hit hardest, the hiccup left many questioning the reliability of on-demand software services compared to on-premise openly on the mirco-blogging site Twitter.

That said, many did note that the outage was a rare one for the firm, and while some had no access for close to an hour others noticed as little as five minutes of interruption.

What the incident does highlight, is that while most companies will suffer hour or more long outages at some point, if the issue is local then one company has a problem. However, in the cloud arena if a host like Salesforce.com disappears offline, many companies suddenly have a problem.

As for what caused the outage, Salesforce.com has not yet announced what the problem was.

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