Salesforce.com Outage Tuesday Left Thousands Without Data
January 08 2009 - 6:10PM
Dow Jones News
Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM), the online business-applications
company, Tuesday suffered an outage that left thousands of
businesses without access to data and applications.
The problem, caused by a network failure, affected all of the
San Francisco company's world data centers for around 40 minutes.
Salesforce.com has just under 60,000 customers, the company had
said in November, although it didn't immediately comment on whether
all of those were affected.
While the outage was resolved quickly, the problem underscores
concerns that could make large corporate customers reluctant to
embrace the "software as a service" model espoused by
Salesforce.com.
The system should have triggered a "failover," allowing other
redundant data centers to take over after the main ones failed, but
this didn't happen. Staff eventually manually restarted the data
centers.
In a message on the company's Website, Salesforce.com said it
was "confident the root cause [of the problem] has been addressed
by the work-around."
Salesforce.com said its technology team was working with
hardware vendors to fully explain the problem, and would update its
customers.
The company allows business customers to host applications and
data on Salesforce.com's own servers, minimizing the need for
costly and time-consuming software updates. Users pay for the
applications and services on a per-use basis.
While shutdowns like this are rare for Salesforce.com, one IT
security specialist, who didn't want to be named, said that they
posed significant security risks for the company's customers. A
shutdown of even 40 minutes could potentially infect thousands or
tens of thousands of customers with viruses, this person said.
Salesforce.com didn't immediately respond to a question about
whether the outage led to any security breaches.
-By Jessica Hodgson; Dow Jones Newswires; 415-439-6455;
jessica.hodgson@dowjones.com
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