Arik Hesseldahl

Recent Posts by Arik Hesseldahl

Salesforce Went Down for About Three Hours Today in North America and Europe

A system update that went awry appears to be the cause of a failure that took Salesforce.com down across much of North America and most of Europe. In some cases, the outage lasted for as long as three hours.

Salesforce acknowledged the outage on its System Status page, which shows that seven out of 17 instances in North America were affected, as were two out of four in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. Two instances in the Asia Pacific region were unaffected.

According to a Salesforce statement, the problem began at a little before 9 pm ET last night. If you were trying to use Salesforce.com during the next three hours or so in the affected regions, you probably had trouble signing on.

The company said the preliminary findings point to planned maintenance on networking equipment that clearly didn’t go as planned.

The timing could have been better. On Monday Salesforce will report quarterly earnings. And, on the same day, the company’s Dreamforce conference gets under way in San Francisco. CEO Marc Benioff is giving a big keynote address on Tuesday that will more or less set the table for Salesforce’s agenda in 2014.

A lot of people took to Twitter to express their frustration. Here’s one.

Anyway, here’s Salesforce’s statement, referring specifically to its NA2 instance in North America, but the message was the same across all the others.

Time: 11/15/13 01:51 AM UTC

Detail: On November 15, 2013 the salesforce.com Technology Team resolved a service disruption affecting the NA2 instance.

The problem began at 01:51 UTC and was resolved by 04:51 UTC. During this time, customers may have experienced an inability to access or intermittent errors to Salesforce application.

Root Cause: The salesforce.com Team is investigating the root cause of this issue. The preliminary findings point it to planned maintenance in the network tier.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald