Salesforce’s massive outage exposes the hidden risks of cloud dependencies

While its flagship Dreamforce event was in full swing on Wednesday, Salesforce was triaging a roughly seven and a half hour-long service outage that disrupted user access and caused “severe delays” and intermittent errors. Some customers were also unable to submit new support cases. The service outage hit at 3:50 a.m. EDT, impacting “multiple instances across all regions,” Salesforce reported. It was marked resolved right around 3 p.m. EDT, after several hours of monitoring to determine that fixes had been successful. Salesforce initially pegged the issue to an “external dependency failure” impacting the legacy login server. A core system component experienced increased load, limiting its capacity to process requests. The company confirmed that there were no issues with third-party infrastructure. Beyond the obvious embarrassment from the outage occurring during Dreamforce, an analyst said the incident highlights a cloud resilience problem, rather than purely a legacy one. “Cloud does not eliminate architectural dependencies,” said Abbas Jaffery, a principal advisory director at Info-Tech Research Group. “It can sometimes make them less visible. And when the platform is your syste…

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