Why Salesforce is down? Here's everything to know

Salesforce, the cloud-based software giant, experienced a widespread global service disruption on Wednesday, September 16, coinciding with the second day of its flagship Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The outage is reportedly due to a failure in an internal login service.

This left customers across all regions unable to access core services, with many reporting severe delays, intermittent errors, and difficulties creating support cases.

As per Salesforce’s status page, the disruption started around 07:50 UTC (5:50 pm AEST) and was tracked under incident ID 20004433.

Initially, the company stated that its core system components experienced increased load, restricting its capacity to process requests. Early investigations suggest that requests were stalling while waiting for a response from an internal login service, which was consuming available server resources.

In a series of updates, Salesforce confirmed that it had attempted rolling restarts before abandoning that approach in favor of a code-level fix. The company validated the fix on a test instance before rolling it out fleetwide. 

Around 6:56 a.m. Eastern Time, Salesforce reported that services were returned to normal, though it warned that some customers may still experience residual issues. GovCloud customers were confirmed to be out of impact.

The timing is particularly unfortunate for Salesforce, as it is hosting Dreamforce, its annual conference where AI-focused products are unveiled, including Alforce and a partnership with Anthropic’s Claude.