Salesforce.com hit with second major outage in two weeks

IDG News Service - Salesforce.com suffered a significant service outage on Tuesday, less than two weeks after another serious set of system problems.

The cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) vendor's systems are divided into many instances around the world, each serving customers in different geographic regions.

Seven instances went down at some time or another on Tuesday, starting with NA1, NA5 and NA6 in North America, according to a notice posted at 12:49 a.m. PDT on Salesforce.com's system status page. Shortly thereafter, the CS0, CS1, CS3 and CS12 regions, which are part of a set of "sandbox" instances Salesforce.com customers can use for development, testing and new feature previewing, were also affected, according to the site.

Salesforce.com's Application Store also went down because it shares infrastructure with the NA6 instance, the site said in another update.

A number of instances had yet to be restored and the search infrastructure for the NA1, NA5 and NA6 instances was experiencing performance issues, according to an update at 6:30 a.m. PDT.

It wasn't immediately clear what caused the problems. At 2:46 a.m. PDT, Salesforce.com said that "power problems" had been detected and fixed, but the outages persisted.

Some Salesforce.com customers may still be reeling from the last system outage, which occurred in late June. Those problems were caused by a fault in Salesforce.com's storage tier, the company said at the time.

Chris Kanaracus covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Chris's e-mail address is Chris_Kanaracus@idg.com