Salesforce Is Down: Updates About the Global Outage

At 6:30 am UTC on October 1st, Salesforce issued a critical update stating that 80+ instances of Salesforce were experiencing degradation at varying levels, affecting their “Core Service”.

You could say that the start of October brings some ‘spooky’ news, as the underlying cause of the outage remains unknown. With one of Salesforce’s core values being “trust”, we’ll receive regular updates as well as a conclusion on the cause (we will update this article once this information becomes available). 

When we first reported on this, the incident had been ongoing for 8.5+ hours. Throughout the day, we monitored the incident; what’s notable is that a growing number of instances were added to the list affected, including “USAXX” instances.

“Investigations have highlighted that the impact radius is broader than initially understood. We have updated the posting to reflect the additional instances experiencing impact, and customers in these instances will receive communications related to this incident going forward.”

Source: Salesforce Trust Status

October 1st Outage: Key Facts

• The underlying cause of the outage remains uncovered. 
• Check direct updates from Salesforce here. If this doesn’t work, it’s because the Trust site was also experiencing interruption for some people. 
• Responses to support cases could advise you to undergo general troubleshooting (e.g. try a different browser). This is not a viable ‘quick fix’ when the outage is ongoing. 
• The number of affected instances is growing, but also reducing at the same time. “A number of customers are reporting that they’re out of impact and are not seeing additional issues. The team continues to perform health checks. The first phase of the Emergency Release is nearing completion at which stage validation checks will take place.” – Source. 

October 2nd Resolution: Key Facts

• As of 04:31 UTC, the issue has been resolved following the completion of the emergency release rollout.
• The Salesforce Technology team has validated the health of the impacted instances and has confirmed that customers should no longer see any impact.
• A full investigation into the incident will be performed to establish the technical trigger, underlying cause, and preventive action to avoid a recurrence of the incident.

The preliminary RCA (Root Cause Analysis) for the incident is available here. In the coming week, an update will be provided.

Am I Affected by the Salesforce Outage? 

On the incident listing on Salesforce’s Trust website, you can see the instances affected (note: click the arrow to expand the view). You’ll need to know which instance you’re on to compare it with the list.

Reported effects are mainly around reports and dashboards not loading or malfunctioning with indecipherable error messages. 

Summary: What Caused the Salesforce Outage? 

Without an underlying cause communicated by Salesforce, it’s not our place to speculate. However, respondents on the Reddit thread dedicated to this incident have mentioned possible cybersecurity threats. There’s also the possibility that it could be “just like Permissiongeddon back in May ’19” (Source: Reddit comment). Keep checking the Trust page as more instances are added to the list affected.