Salesforce Global Outage Hits During Dreamforce Conference

Salesforce suffered a major global outage on September 16, disrupting cloud services for customers across multiple continents. The incident occurred during the company's flagship Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, where it was showcasing its enterprise AI ambitions.

The disruption affected users in all three of Salesforce's operational zones, with hundreds of customer instances experiencing severe delays or complete loss of access to cloud platform features. According to the company, requests were stalling while waiting for a response from an internal login service, which consumed available server resources.

Engineers validated a fix and began deployment by 6:56 a.m. Eastern, with services gradually returning to normal. The outage occurred despite Salesforce's solid financial performance, with the company reporting fiscal second-quarter revenue of $11.35 billion, an 11% increase from the prior year.