sforce claims an internal action was responsible for service outage

A change in permissions on the internal side caused a massive outage today. Customers were unable to access services for a few hours as a result.

Shanmugam Chinnasamy said, “This is our public cloud service,” during a video conference with customers. “We call AWS from Salesforce and introduced a permission change that caused this problem.”

Salesforce cloud services are affected by wide-ranging effects. The graphic shown during the call indicated that most, if not all, of Salesforce’s cloud-based services were affected.

Chinnasamy stated that the company’s tech team was made aware of the disruption in service at 11:03 (EST). He added that because this was a problem with Salesforce’s communication with AWS, no customer data was at risk.

We had issues this morning with the attachments (files, documents, etc.). “The error message pointed to Amazon AWS’ bad gateway,” a customer wrote on the call chat. “Fortunately, [it] was resolved within a few hours.”

Customers who called wanted to know why Salesforce didn’t update its trust site until 11:53 am. Cuthbert Langley of Salesforce’s Tech Crisis Communications team said that the company wanted to get a full picture of what happened.

Business hours? Customers asked the company why they did an update during business hours.

Chinnasamy explained, “We will perform root cause analysis to understand what happened and why. We will then get back to you.”

Langley says that people who have more specific questions or concerns should contact their sales representative for further advice.

Why do we care? The majority of core applications that are used by marketing organizations today are cloud-based. Cloud was a new concept, and there were many concerns about the security of data. Cloud applications are now generally regarded as more reliable and secure than their predecessors on-premise. This incident shows how human error can cause problems.

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The original post Salesforce claims an internal issue caused a service outage was published on MarTech.