Another salesforce.com outage

Users are reporting yet another outage of Salesforce.com's application services, this time commencing at about 11.30am Eastern time today. Ever since the company experienced an extended outage just before Christmas, the company's performance has been under scrutiny and this latest occurence, coming just a day before the company's own year-end on 31st January, cannot have come at a worse time.

Fortunately some users at least are getting updates on what's going on, thanks to the automated 'system status' page Salesforce implemented along with the new Winter 06 release earlier this month. But as far as I know that's only available to Premium Support customers for now. And the information it provides basically only tells users that Salesforce.com knows it has a problem — it's too early to say what the problem is or when it's going to get fixed.

Posters to salesforcewatch.com's comments page are pretty sore. One says:

"has been intermittent all day. lost an entire morning of productivity and it appears i will lose the early afternoon as well. this is a terrible product."

Salesforce will say that such problems will become less prevalent once it brings its new mirrored data centers live next month, although if the current problem is similar to the database glitch that caused the pre-Christmas outage, then mirrored data centers would just mirror the problem. Perhaps the company should just sack its database provider (Oracle) instead ...