A "fault in [the] storage tier" first reported at approximately 6:35 a.m. ET led to service outages for an untold number of customers until a hardware replacement at one of Salesforce.com's data centers resolved the problem at 12:34 p.m. ET, according to official vendor tweets and its system status site.
"Performance degredation issues" were also reported and resolved within 90 minutes Thursday morning during this same time period at other service centers in North American and European. The system status site attributed those issues to unexpected faults to its storage tier, and the vendor wrote it would investigate "more effective methods to manage database resource contention." All 37 of Salesforce.com's services sources, or instances, reported as functioning normally Friday morning.
The first Twitter messages acknowledging an outage from the official Salesforce.com account went out at approximately 8 a.m. ET. There, the SaaS provider stated its tech team was working on the issue and urged patience with its customers. At 11:50 a.m. ET, the Salesforce Twitter feed reported to customers that it was engaged in a hardware replacement at the primarily impacted service center, named NA2, "to see if that fixes the issue."
"We thank you for your continued business and patience during this situation," read a message on the Salesforce.com system status site.
The system status site link provided to customers via Twitter by Salesforce.com was also down for the first few hours of the outage.
(Editor's note: This story has been edited throughout Thursday to reflect changes in the service distruption. Information-Management.com will continue to follow this story as it develops.)
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
