Salesforce staggers back to feet after global outage
Salesforce suffered a massive global outage triggered by a core login service stalling and exhausting server resources.
Deep dive
- Root cause: Stalling internal login service consumed all available server capacity.
- Impact radius: Widespread disruption across the US, Japan, India, and Europe.
- Mitigation strategy: Initially relied on automated fleetwide fixes; later shifted to targeted restarts and manual recovery for specific Hyperforce instances.
- Communication timeline: The vendor took several hours to identify and validate the fix, during which customer support case creation was also disabled.
Decoder
- Hyperforce: Salesforce’s re-architecture of its platform to run on public cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP) rather than its own proprietary data centers.
- SaaS (Software as a Service): A cloud-based software delivery model where applications are accessed via a browser rather than installed locally.
Original article
Salesforce staggers back to feet after global outage
UPDATED An hours-long Salesforce outage on Wednesday hit customers with severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services, according to the SaaS vendor's status page.
The outage hit hundreds of instances throughout the world, including the USA, Japan, India, the UK, France, and Germany.
The service disruption was first reported around 0930 BST (0830 UTC) on September 16. An update at 1219 BST (1056 UTC) said the company had validated and rolled out a fix, and customers were seeing service return to normal. However, as of 1500 BST (1400 UTC), the company said that the fix had not completely restored all instances of the problem, and it had "received reports of scheduled jobs not running as expected for some customers who are now able to access the service."
A previous update at 1010 BST (0910 UTC) by the CRM giant said its investigation indicated that "requests are stalling while waiting on a response from an internal login service, which is using up available server resources."
The vendor added: "Customers continue to experience severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services. This also affects support case creation."
Salesforce's customer list is a roll-call of global giants from all industries, including include Amazon, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and IBM.
The outage came at a bad time for the SaaS company. Yesterday, it kicked off its annual conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco. More than 40,000 people are expected to attend in person, with in excess of 200,000 people registered to attend online.
Salesforce told The Register: "We're aware of the service disruption affecting some customers and are actively working to resolve the issue. Per our latest update at 3:56 a.m. PT, we've validated a fix and will be rolling out the fix to impacted instances."
Updates to the situation, which is still ongoing as of 1725 UTC, are below.
Updated at 2020 BTS (1920 UTC)
Salesforce says that the incident has now been resolved.
Updated at 1722 BTS (1622 UTC):
Salesforce says that the impact radius is narrower than they originally thought. They will continue to update impacted instances.
Updated at 1650 BST (1550 UTC):
Salesforce has completed the next phase of its rollout and narrowed the remaining disruption to a subset of Hyperforce instances. Its first-party environments are unaffected.
Mitigation is in place across nearly all affected instances, although the company continues targeted restarts and manual recovery work where the automated fix has not fully resolved the problem. Some customers could still experience delays, errors, and problems accessing services or creating support cases.
Updated at 1522 BST (1422 UTC):
Salesforce said it was manually restarting instances where the automated fix hadn't fully resolved the issue, and that it was still receiving reports of scheduled jobs not running as expected for some customers who were able to access the service. It also said that the "impact radius" of the problem was "narrower than initially understood."
Updated at 1429 BST (1329 UTC):
Salesforce said the rollout had not completed successfully on some instances, leaving customers exposed to the original problem. The company is reapplying the fix and warns that some users might need to clear cached data or restart their sessions to recover fully.
Updated at 1407 BST (1307 UTC):
Salesforce said most instances were recovering as the rollout progressed. Some customers may continue to encounter errors until their instance is manually restarted, and the company has yet to confirm when the incident would be fully resolved.
Updated at 1327 BST (1227 UTC):
Salesforce said services were returning to normal in regions where the rollout had been completed. The company continues to monitor the deployment while working on a permanent fix.
Updated at 1300 BST (1200 UTC):
Salesforce said the fix was being deployed region by region and that service was improving, although it had no confirmed completion time. GovCloud customers were no longer affected, but others could continue to experience severe delays, intermittent errors, and problems accessing some services or creating support cases.
Updated at 1227 BST (1127 UTC):
Salesforce said the fix was being rolled out "fleetwide" and that customers were seeing service return to normal.
Updated at 1200 BST (1100 UTC):
Salesforce said the fix had been successfully validated on a test instance and would now be deployed across all affected instances.
Updated at 1142 BST (1042 UTC):
Salesforce said increased load on a core system component had limited its capacity to process requests. The company is testing a fix on one instance and plans to deploy it across its fleet once validated.
Updated at 1109 BST (1009 UTC) on September 16, 2026, to add:
Salesforce said in its latest update that it is "no longer pursuing restarts as a path to remediation. Customers continue to experience severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services and support case creation."
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