Salesforce Resolves Service Disruption After Nearly Four Hours

Some hiccups seem to have delayed a fix to an outage that affected customers in North America.

After hiccups in mitigating a virtual server problem, Salesforce resolved a disruption that took some customers offline mid-Tuesday for almost four hours.

The service disruption that started at 11:54 a.m. Pacific Time affected users hosted on Salesforce’s NA89 instance, according to Salesforce’s status page and notifications sent to customers. The North America 89 instance—one of nearly 200 for North America— runs in data centers in Phoenix and Washington, D.C., with transactions replicated across those locations for redundancy.

By 1:10 p.m., Salesforce reported a successful site switch to reroute traffic after its team identified the likely problem as a power outage affecting network switches routing traffic to NA89.

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

But problems continued, as the “the NA89 instance then went into a brief period of performance degradation” for the next two minutes, the status page reported.

That degradation also impacted Salesforce Live Agent, a tool on the platform for real-time communications with website users.

At 3:23 p.m., Salesforce reported: “We have identified a potential cause of the Live Agent issue and are urgently working on implementing a fix to resolve the impact to customers.”

All was well two minutes later, ending a three-hour, 43-minute outage.

In May of last year, Salesforce saw a major outage triggered by a Pardot marketing automation software scripting error. Although the scripting error only affected the Pardot service, Salesforce initially blocked access to all instances of its software for affected organizations.

A more significant outage that lasted almost a day in May of 2016 resulted in some customers losing four hours of data.