The absolute last time a company wants its namesake product to stop working is during a big annual event when everyone is talking about said company.
Salesforce learned that the hard way on Wednesday morning, per Quartz. The Salesforce software status page indicated that the company’s enterprise software, used for things like tracking sales data and invoices, suffered an outage around 3:50 a.m. ET on Wednesday morning. The Salesforce Dreamforce event kicked off on Sept. 15.
Quarts reported that Salesforce’s cloud suite became partially inaccessible to customers on Wednesday, as errors and other mishaps became more common than usual.
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By about 7:00 a.m. ET, the problem had been mostly fixed, and the brief Salesforce outage appeared to be over. DownDetector showed user error reports for Salesforce spiking around 3:50 a.m. and steadily dropping as the work day began.
On its status page, Salesforce attributed the problems to an external vendor issue affecting Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge: “The vendor has released a fix for the intermittent freezing issue affecting Chrome 153 version. Customers using Chrome should update to the latest available version, which resolves the issue. Customers using Microsoft Edge 153 version may continue to experience intermittent freezing, as the fix for Edge browser is still pending.”
This may not sound like a huge deal, except that the roughly three-hour outage occurred right in the middle of the company’s annual tech conference in San Francisco. Considering that Dreamforce largely acts as a marketing tool for Salesforce itself, it’s really inconvenient for the company’s flagship product to stop working during the event.
Salesforce is fortunate that the outage occurred during overnight hours in the United States, at least, and that it got resolved before most of the country woke up. Our condolences to the engineers who had to work tough hours to get it fixed.
