Business

Salesforce outage persists across US, CEO wades in

Irritated customers of the SaaS company have taken to social media to show their displeasure.

Written by Charlie Osborne, Contributing Writer May 10, 2016 at 11:07 p.m. PT

A Salesforce database failure has left some clients unable to access their services across the United States, prompting the firm's chief executive to step in.

According to Salesforce's metrics and server status page, the problem is down to the NA14 instance.

Salesforce, which specialises as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, groups customer systems together in instances which link data centers and databases together in organized groups.

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There is only one instance of service disruption out of 45 database instances in the US, which means that only a subset of Salesforce customers has been affected by the disruption across the country.

In an update, Salesforce said the NA14 service disruption was the "result of a database failure on the NA14 instance, which introduced a file integrity issue in the NA14 database."

At the time of writing, the system has experienced disruption for at least 18 hours and is not yet back online.

A number of Salesforce customers took to Twitter to complain about the outage and a lack of information. In a tweet, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stepped in, apologizing for the issue and offering his email address to one particularly frustrated client.

There is currently no word on when the database will be back online, but Salesforce has admitted the job might take longer than one would expect. The firm said:

"The Salesforce Technology Team has been working around the clock with our vendors to pursue multiple paths to repair the file integrity issue, which we believed to be the fastest and most reliable path to recovery. However at this point, we do not believe we will be able to repair the file integrity issue.
To bring NA14 back to full health, we have shifted our focus to recovering from a prior backup, which was not impacted by the file integrity issues."

A representative of the SaaS company did not comment on the service disruption; instead, forwarded interested parties to the Salesforce status page for updates.