Salesforce.com Goes Offline

Customers reported that the company's site was unreachable for at least a few hours and the salesforcewatch.com Web site posted an image of the outage message to customers around 2:45 p.m. eastern Tuesday.

The message read: "The salesforce.com servers are temporarily unable to respond to your request. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you for your patience and please try again in a few moments."

Salesforce.com spokespeople could not be reached for comment Tuesday night or Wednesday morning.

Competitors were quick to jump into the fray. "Salesforce.com is quick to tout their growing user base, but one should question their ability to adequately support this growth," wrote Jonathan Tang, CEO of Salesnet, a Boston-based provider of hosted CRM systems in an email message.