Bulletins

Widespread Salesforce outage even takes out the status page

A prolonged, widespread outage affected customers of several different Salesforce products Tuesday afternoon, and also took down its status page.

"Salesforce is currently experiencing a service disruption across multiple instances," the company confirmed on Twitter with a link to its status page, which was not working. The sales and marketing software company uses a combination of cloud providers and its own data centers to provide its services, and it was not immediately clear what was causing the outage.

Several customers took to Twitter to inform their own customers that responses to support tickets and other inquiries would be delayed until the outage is resolved.

Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris acknowledged the outage on Twitter, blaming the disruption on a "DNS issue," which is a very common reason for prolonged cloud service outages.

This story was updated at 4:14 p.m. PT to include Harris's explanation of the outage.

Tom Krazit

Tom Krazit ( @tomkrazit) is Protocol's enterprise editor, covering cloud computing and enterprise technology out of the Pacific Northwest. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET, paidContent, and GeekWire, and served as executive editor of Gigaom and Structure.

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