Salesforce goes down, while speculation and conspiracy theories go up

Salesforce suffered an outage across a number of instances Tuesday, making some features of its platform unavailable to users, while others reported they could not log into Salesforce at all.

Salesforce referred to the incident as a “degradation of service” and issued a number of updates throughout the day on Tuesday. As is often the case with SaaS outages (and crises in general), the initial communications to the public weren’t always accurate.

Salesforce would go on to correct both the scope and the start time of the incident in its communications throughout the day. But what users really wanted was information on the cause of the problem. 

Once Salesforce announced a manual fix and then emergency releases to address the problem, users posting on social media platforms were pushing for an explanation because it’s often easier to fix something once you understand how it broke in the first place. 

All of the suspense and the stream of updates seemed to take a toll on the Salesforce Trust site, where users go for updates, as well. 

The lack of details, of course, led to speculation. Much of it focused on the timing of the incident and outages impacting other online platforms. The Sony PlayStation Network was down for a number of users late Monday and early Tuesday, leading to speculation about a coordinated cyber attack targeting popular online platforms. 

Tuesday was also the first day of a new month and, for many, a new fiscal quarter — important times for people in sales, marketing and revenue operations. 

It’s likely when all is said and done, a large-scale cyber attack and hackers with a vendetta against global revenue organizations won’t be to blame. We also have to recognize the thirst for explanations and immediate answers isn’t practical either. Salesforce has nothing to gain from releasing information about the cause before it’s confident in its accuracy. 

While plenty of Salesforce users took to the internet to vent, other users took to online communities and did what they do best: provided a chuckle in the face of adversity.