Self congratulations and an outage

It was an up and down week for Salesforce.com. On the plus side, Salesforce was proud to announce their March success with a statement to the media Wednesday (5 March) announcing that the company had “delivered 99.999% planned uptime and availability on its service to its customers" in the month. Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff was quoted as stating that the company’s “outstanding performance in March is evidence of our dedication to scaling ahead of [our customers’] needs.” Friday was another matter altogether. Salesforce.com went down for between one hour and four hours; the latter was doubly unfortunate, as this was the figure in North America.

Salesforce first informed that the problem stemmed from cache server overload. After attempts to address the problem with a cache server restart failed, system administrators then pulled the cache servers, in turn causing a slowing of service. Everything was up and running again by Saturday and has been since then, according to the website trust.salesforce.com. The service systems status monitor page is updated daily at 5pm GMT and was created in response to a database cluster crash in December 2005, the last major black mark on the Salesforce.com record.