Salesforce.com Suffers Outage

One of Salesforce.com's key North American CRM servers, NA5, was up and down for most of the business day Feb. 11 following a software upgrade, a Salesforce customer who asked to remain anonymous told eWEEK.

The unstable server caused some havoc in an unspecified number of customers' accounts, the customer said.

The software upgrade was installed over the weekend, but at 8:22 a.m. Pacific time, the company's internal server information Web page said,  "NA5 Service Degradation: The technology operations team has been made aware of intermittent service disruptions to NA5. Please check back for further updates."

Salesforce.com, based in San Francisco, subsequently reported similar "service degradations" at 9:26 a.m., 10:19 a.m., 11:23 p.m. and 12:20 p.m. before announcing at 2:04 p.m. that "the Salesforce.com Technology team has restored the service issue with NA5 at 22:11 UTC. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you."

The tech op team did not specify exactly what the root cause of the problem was. That information may be posted by tomorrow, a Salesforce.com employee told eWEEK. The employee did not want his name used because he is not authorized to speak for the company.

A Salesforce.com spokesperson has not returned calls from eWEEK at this time.

Salesforce.com has more than 38,000 customers, 3,500 employees and about 1,000 sales people.