Salesforce.com hit by outages

Posted by Mike Snyder on January 8, 2009  |  Comments (3)

As I have mentioned on this blog numerous times, our #1 competitor is Salesforce.com. Therefore, there was a little schadenfreude in the air at our office this week with the news of global outages at Salesforce.com:

• Salesforce.com outage hits thousands of businesses CNET
• Salesforce.com Network Device Failure Shuts Thousands Out of SAAS Apps eWeek
• Salesforce Suffers System Wide Outage PC World
• Salesforce.com outage provokes angry response VNUNet

The following is my favorite quote from the various articles:

However, Steve Moyle, chief technology officer of database seucity firm Secerno, said the incident raises serious questions of trust for Salesforce.com.

"Almost a million users who have out-sourced a mission critical business function are paralysed and not able to access their own customer data, weakening their trust in the system," he added.

I am sure that Salesforce.com supporters will be quick to point out that on-premise deployments might also suffer from similar outages, and I wouldn't disagree. This week's outage, although it was very severe, probably wasn't bad enough to get existing Salesforce.com customers to switch. However I think that Steve Moyle's quote is right on the money...these outages will slowly chip away at customer's trust in the Salesforce.com service.