Salesforce outage: What happened as customers faced delays and errors worldwide

Salesforce customers around the world faced a major service outage on Wednesday, with users reporting severe delays, intermittent errors and problems accessing some Salesforce services. The outage affected hundreds of Salesforce instances across several countries, including the US, Japan, India, the UK, France and Germany.

Salesforce services faced a major outage affecting customers worldwide. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey, File) (AP)The service disruption was first reported at around 9:30 BST (8:30 UTC) on September 16, according to Salesforce's status page. Salesforce initially said its investigation found that customer requests were getting stuck while waiting for a response from an internal login service. The company said this was using up available server resources.

The company said the issue was serious enough to affect support case creation as well, meaning some customers were unable to create cases with Salesforce support during the outage. The company said customers were still facing severe delays, intermittent errors and difficulty accessing some services.

At 11:42 BST (10:42 UTC), Salesforce gave more details about the problem. It said increased load on a core system component had reduced its ability to process customer requests.

The company said it would deploy the fix across its wider system once testing showed that the solution was working. It then started preparing to deploy the fix across all affected instances.

By 12:27 BST (11:27 UTC), Salesforce said the fix was being rolled out across its entire affected fleet. The company also said customers were beginning to see services return to normal.

The outage affected Salesforce at a particularly important time for the company because its annual Dreamforce conference began in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Therefore, the key issue identified by Salesforce was linked to increased load on a core system component and requests waiting for an internal login service, which affected the system's available capacity to handle requests.

Durva More is a Senior Content Producer at Hindustan Times, where she covers finance, and global news. She brings experience across digital and television journalism, with a strong focus on breaking news, business reporting, and international affairs. Before joining Hindustan Times, Durva worked as an International News Writer at The Economic Times, covering a diverse range of subjects including global politics, business, sports, entertainment, and major world events. She also worked as a Business Reporter with NDTV Profit. A postgraduate diploma holder in Journalism from the Asian College of Journalism, Durva is passionate about field reporting and storytelling. She thrives on the adrenaline of chasing stories, speaking with people from different walks of life, and amplifying voices that deserve to be heard. Her reporting is driven by curiosity, accuracy, and a commitment to making complex subjects accessible to readers. When she is not chasing stories or covering breaking news, Durva enjoys reading books and painting. She loves exploring new ideas, meeting people, and learning about different perspectives. For her, both journalism and art are ways to understand the world and tell stories that matter.Read More