Salesforce.com Rings in New Year With Massive Service Disruption

For Salesforce.com (CRM) 2010 began with an ignominious start — a widespread service outage on the first business day of the new year. According to the software-as-a-service vendor’s system status page, service degradation isses that began at around 7 AM PST this morning evolved into full-blow disruptions by 12:10 PM PST and continue to plague that company as of this writing. At one point 9 of 16 Salesforce instances were down, leaving thousands of customers without access to its offerings.

UPDATE: Well, that was fast. Salesforce has evidently resolved whatever issues it was suffering and has restored service. The disruption lasted a little over an hour. “The Salesforce.com Technology Team has resolved the service disruption issues on all instances from 12:10PM PST to 1:25PM PST,” the company reported on its system status page. “All services are restored at this time. We are performing a review of the incident and will take any corrective action needed. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and appreciate your patience.”

UPDATE: I spoke to soon. The company suffered another disruption at 1:49 PM PST …

UPDATE: … And as of 1:58 PM PST that’s been resolved as well.