Salesforce Service Outages Strike on Day 2 of Dreamforce Conference

Salesforce users grappled with service delays and outages on the second day of the company’s annual Dreamforce conference. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

Key Points

• Salesforce users lose access to the company’s cloud software suite on Wednesday due to a widespread service outage.
• The outage coincides with the second day of Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco.
• Salesforce engineers found a solution to the issue and began deploying the fix across all regions.

Salesforce users briefly lost access to its cloud software suite on Wednesday as a widespread service outage struck on the second day of the company’s annual Dreamforce conference.

Issues began around 3:50 a.m. Eastern time, according to an incident tracker on Salesforce’s status page. Customers across all three operating regions, mainly in the U.S., were subject to “severe delays, intermittent errors, or an inability to access some services,” the alert read.

Roughly three hours after the first notification, Salesforce confirmed that its engineers had found a solution, tested it in a controlled environment, and confirmed that it works as expected.

The company said it was deploying the fix across all regions, adding that “customers are starting to see their service return to normal.” In tandem, Salesforce is working on what it calls a permanent, code-level resolution.

Salesforce, whose client roster includes major enterprises like Amazon , IBM , and Walmart , has positioned itself as a leader in “agentic” customer relationship management. The company deploys artificial-intelligence agents across its software suite to handle workflows without human intervention.

Another major customer is the U.S. government. Salesforce serves federal agencies through GovCloud, an isolated environment tailored to meet federal security frameworks. As of early Wednesday, GovCloud customers were “confirmed to be out of impact,” Salesforce said.

The outages coincided with the second day of the company’s flagship technology conference, which is held once a year in San Francisco. The long-running event dates back to 2003 and serves a major commercial and marketing engine for the company.

Salesforce shares were little changed in premarket trading Wednesday. Futures tracking the benchmark S&P 500 and tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite each rose slightly.

Beyond serving as a product showcase for Salesforce, the Dreamforce event is a gathering place for big names in tech. Much of Tuesday’s discussion centered on whether companies should rein in their AI models as calls to slow the pace of development grow louder.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman validated concerns that a tiny group of AI companies could hold disproportionate influence over the economy and public opinion. Nvidia Jensen Huang, meanwhile, rejected the doomsday narrative, urging AI developers to take responsibility instead.

“We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations,” Huang asserted. He instead encouraged companies to exercise sound judgment and launch products only when confident in their safety and capability.

Write to Mackenzie Tatananni at mackenzie.tatananni@barrons.com

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