Salesforce.com suffers another outage

IDG News Service - Salesforce.com Inc.'s hosted CRM service had a widespread outage yesterday, the second time in recent weeks the on-demand software provider has suffered a serious crash.

Anecdotal customer reports suggest that Salesforce.com's service was intermittent for much of the day and that the company's system status page acknowledged "system performance issues" in the afternoon. When Salesforce.com revived its service, its application programming interface remained disabled for several hours longer, inconveniencing customers with customizations that rely on that interface.

Bruce Francis, chief strategist at San Francisco-based Salesforce.com, said in an e-mailed statement that the crash was not severe, and he disputed assertions that it was widespread. "We had a brief period of diminished availability yesterday -- about 30 minutes, more or less," he said. "Some of the claims I have seen are not factual."

Salesforce.com's problems follow a December outage that knocked its service off-line for most of a day, a glitch the company blamed on errors in its database clusters. Customers criticized the vendor for its sluggish acknowledgment of the problem: It took Salesforce.com more than a day to publicly post information about the outage. In response, the company created a system status update page that customers paying for premium support services can access.

Salesforce.com has 350,000 subscribers for its hosted sales management software service. Continued outages could be a customer-relations disaster for the company, First Albany analyst Mark Murphy warned in a research note about yesterday's problems.

"This morning's outage is apparently leading to more aggravated customer and prospect responses, as from their perspective the outage experience has transitioned from an isolated event into a recurring trend and the 'get out of jail free' card has been used," Murphy wrote during the outage.

Computerworld's Marc L. Songini contributed to this report.