Salesforce Outage October 2024: Impact, Updates, and Solutions

On October 1st, 2024, Salesforce appeared to Have experienced a widespread outage that knocked out performance for over 80 instances and left core services slower than a snail on Valium. The outage started around 6:30 UTC, and by over 8.5 hours, as I write this, the root cause of the outage remains unknown. 

This outage has been especially crippling since Salesforce underscores trust as one of its core values, which essentially means transparency and fairness in service delivery to its customers. Yet, while the Trust website of Salesforce, where system status updates are given in real-time, is running, some clients claim that the site can’t be reached when details regarding the outage are needed. 

This is an added frustration but also forms part of the woes of organizations that rely on the platform for critical business functions such as customer relationship management, sales pipeline, and workflow management.

Key Facts About the Outage

Reason for Outage Not Known: At this point, it is not known what caused the outage. Online forums and user discussions have pointed to a variety of security-related issues, but no official statement has confirmed that security issues are at play.

Cases Affected Grow in Number Even though some cases are reported to heal from the issue, the growing number of affected cases is observed. Salesforce teams run health checks and have issued an emergency update to address the problem.

Ongoing performance problems: Users are encountering multiple problems, most of which are dashboard and report load failures and cryptic error messages. Most of them found that this severely affected key functionalities in their Salesforce environments and thus caused operational delays.

Am I Affected By the Salesforce Downtime?

If you are unsure whether your instance has been affected, you can check the real-time list of affected cases on the Trust Salesforce website. To do so, you need to identify which instance your organization is using—this could be NA54 or EU13, for example—and compare that to the list on the Trust site. However, it’s worth noting that the Trust site has also experienced small-scale intermittent outages due to this incident. 

Based on reports from impacted customers, issues reported include:

• failure to load dashboards and reports
• error messages that do not provide any useful guidance
• automated jobs which are not running at scheduled times

If you or your organization are experiencing one of these issues, your Salesforce org is likely involved in the outage.

Also Read – Latest Salesforce News and Updates 2024

How Salesforce is Responding

Salesforce has enacted an immediate emergency release in phases. The first phase is nearly complete. After that, validation checks will be conducted to determine whether the system is stable. Some customers have stated that their instances are back on track, whereas other customers are still facing the most severe disturbances.

Salesforce Support no longer provides this advice but has evolved to provide general troubleshooting checklists, such as trying alternative browsers or clearing caches. However, most users have reported that it is ineffective since the root cause is in Salesforce’s infrastructure, not in their configurations on the user side.

Going Forward

Although the organization could not determine the definite root cause of the outage, it assured users that there would be regular updates. Customers are requested to monitor the Salesforce Trust website and communicate openly with their support teams if updates are to be found. In the meantime, it is most important to focus on an early restoration of service.

Once they’ve identified the root cause, Salesforce will publish a detailed account of what happened and how they’ll work to ensure that this does not occur again.

What You Can Do Right Now

• Check your instance: Visit the Salesforce Trust website for real-time information about your instance.
• Prepare to be intermittently impacted: Your business relies heavily on reports and dashboards. Have contingency plans in place if this issue extends beyond the expected timeline.
• Monitor for updates: Stay vigilant via official Salesforce channels and community forums, where any known updated resolutions and workarounds are posted.

Conclusion

Well, Salesforce’s downtime on October 1st caused much discomfort to businesses across the globe. Even though emergency updates are reported to be rolled out and certain instances are being recovered, it may take a while to solve the issue completely. The best thing to do, as long as Salesforce continues to investigate and report back, would be to keep track of things, especially if you rely on the platform for your regular day-to-day activities.

Stay tuned with saasguru for further updates as Salesforce continues to work on restoring full functionality across all affected instances.