Salesforce Inc., the world’s top customer relationship management (CRM) platform, is grappling with a major service outage affecting more than one hundred companies and government bodies across the Asia Pacific region.
Salesforce on Friday said its service was disrupted around 3 p.m. local time in Seoul and end users could not access the service.
“At 05:55 UTC on November 15, 2024, the Salesforce Technology team became aware of a service disruption impacting instances across multiple Data Centers,” the company said in an incident report, referring to Coordinated Universal Time, the primary global time standard used to regulate clocks and time.
The San Francisco, California-based enterprise software provider has yet to determine the cause of the outage.
Salesforce provides cloud-based applications for sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence and application development.
The company commanded 21.7% of the global CRM application market as of 2023, more than triple the 5.9% market share of its closest rival Microsoft Corp., according to the International Data Corporation.
ROLLBACK
To mitigate the impact of the outage, Salesforce took steps to control excessive traffic, network utilization and database stability.
“The database team has analyzed affected databases and identified some inconsistencies. The databases are now being restored from the most recent stable backup,” Salesforce said in the incident report.
Salesforce performed a rollback, the process of reverting a software application to its former state, after its investigation showed that a recent change could have triggered the outage.
“The team has rolled back all production instances and is conducting final checks. The team is now focusing on the sandbox environment in groups, which they expect to take considerable time,” the company said in its latest incident report update.
A sandbox environment is a secure, isolated virtual space that allows users to test, analyze and run software code without affecting the actual operating system, applications or hardware.
AFFECTS MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED BUSINESSES, GOVERNMENT BODIES
The outage affected more than one hundred data centers across Asia Pacific, industry sources in Seoul said.
In South Korea, LG Electronics Inc., Hyundai Mobis Co., Kakao Enterprise Corp., Hanwha Hotels & Resorts Co. and others use Salesforce’s services.
Among them, business-to-consumer (B2C) companies were harder hit, according to the sources.
“The sales department was upset because no one could access the system,” said an official at a major B2C company in Seoul.
Another company is still assessing the damage after its customers could not access its mobile application service, according to company officials.
In Japan, where Salesforce is even more widely used than in Korea, the glitch knocked out local governments’ disaster management systems.
GLOBAL CLOUD OUTAGES
Major information technology outages have affected companies, banks, airlines and governments around the world as more of the public and private sectors embrace cloud services.
In July, Microsoft experienced a significant global outage that impacted 8.5 million Windows PCs and servers, disrupting operations of airports, hospitals, businesses and government organizations worldwide.
The two-day IT crisis caused more than 7,900 flights to be cancelled and 79,902 to be delayed worldwide while suspending electric vehicle maker Tesla Inc.’s plants in the US states of Texas and Nevada.
The glitch was caused by a US cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., which said it was aware of reports of crashes on Microsoft Windows. CrowdStrike attributed the breakdown to a defective software update.
Last month, US air carrier Delta Air Lines filed suit against CrowdStrike, saying the outage crippled its operations for several days, costing it more than $500 million in lost revenue and additional expenses, according to media reports.
By Seung-Woo Lee and Ji-Eun Jeong
leeswoo@hankyung.com
Jongwoo Cheon edited this article.
