Salesforce plays a vital role for businesses all over the globe, driving CRM, marketing automation, analytics, and much more. However, even the strongest platforms can face hiccups.
Over the last five years, Salesforce users have experienced several service interruptions. Some affected login access, others disrupted email delivery, and a few took down entire regions. Each of these outages highlights just how reliant businesses are on the reliability of SaaS.
At StatusGator, we’re here to keep teams in the loop when services like Salesforce experience downtime. As a status page aggregator, StatusGator brings together the statuses of over 5,000 SaaS vendors and cloud providers into one easy-to-read view.
Our users can access historical uptime and outage data. Plus, our Early Warning Signals feature spots potential outages before vendors officially acknowledge them. It gives IT and DevOps teams a chance to stay ahead of the game.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the most significant Salesforce outages from 2020 to 2025, exploring what went wrong and how each incident affected customers around the world.
February 2025: Global Service Disruption Affects Multiple Regions
On February 7, 2025, Salesforce faced a service disruption that lasted for 2 hours and 21 minutes, kicking off at 09:00 UTC.
This incident affected customers across North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific, with specific instances like BRA2S, SWE20, KOR1, and more than 80 other environments feeling the impact.
The disruption was triggered by a surge in network traffic and resource limitations. It caused performance issues, preventing some users from accessing the cloud-based platform, ultimately disrupting critical business operations.
In response, the Salesforce team quickly rolled out scaling strategies and a configuration update to help mitigate the situation and restore service.
Salesforce confirmed that everything was back up and running by 11:21 UTC, and they highlighted their ongoing commitment to strengthening infrastructure.
January 2025: Nearly 4-Day Feature Disruption Affects North America
From January 4 at 03:51 UTC to January 8 at 03:00 UTC, Salesforce faced a major disruption that lasted almost four days. This incident impacted sandbox instances, including USA9906S and other environments. The main issue affected Core Services, leading to errors during deployment processes for Salesforce users.
Salesforce acknowledged the disruption and later pinpointed a technical trigger, which prompted an emergency release through a staggered, region-based deployment. Later, more regions became affected – FRA2S, DEU14S, and USA754S.
The situation was completely resolved on January 8, after successful deployment and validation. Salesforce has committed to investigating the root cause and taking steps to enhance system stability and ensure business continuity.
November 2024: Maintenance Triggered Major Service Disruption
On November 15, 2024, Salesforce experienced a widespread service disruption affecting customers in North America and the Asia Pacific regions.
The outage was triggered by a database maintenance change that mistakenly deleted internal database user objects critical to application functionality.
The incident caused login failures, service inaccessibility, and feature disruptions, including Email-to-Case and Web-to-Case failures.
While Hyperforce instances were not directly affected, some customers experienced cascading login issues due to routing dependencies on first-party infrastructure.
A second phase of the incident involved degraded performance and errors due to invalid configurations of internal customer-specific database objects. Both issues were fully remediated by November 16, 2024.
Salesforce confirmed no customer data was compromised. In response, the company implemented a change moratorium, began reviewing deployment processes, and accelerated efforts to migrate remaining customers to Hyperforce for improved resilience and automation safeguards.
September 2023: Security Policy Update Causes Widespread Disruption
On September 20, 2023, a Salesforce service disruption occurred due to an internal security policy change made at 14:42 UTC. The update was a part of a routine review of security controls. This update unintentionally blocked access to critical Salesforce resources.
The result was a multi-service outage affecting Commerce Cloud, MuleSoft, Tableau, and Marketing Cloud.
The outage duration ranged from 2 to 4 hours for most services, though MuleSoft and Tableau experienced extended recovery times.
The incident impacted global customers who rely on Salesforce for cloud-based business continuity, highlighting the risks of unreviewed configuration changes.
Salesforce has since implemented preventive measures, including stricter change review processes, step-by-step deployments, enhanced monitoring tools, and automated update systems to improve system stability and reduce the risk of future downtime.
September 2022: Marketing Cloud Email Delay
Salesforce experienced a 3-hour and 40-minute disruption on September 20, 2022, affecting Marketing Cloud Stack 10. Customers using Email Studio and Journey Builder across North America faced delays in sending transactional and journey-based emails.
The incident impacted 12 database instances (DB10000–DB10011). The root cause was isolated to the application tier, and the service was fully restored by 22:59 UTC.
May 2021: Major Salesforce Outage Due to DNS Misconfiguration
On May 11, 2021, at approximately 21:45 UTC, Salesforce suffered a widespread outage lasting nearly five hours after a DNS configuration change disrupted access to Core services, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Experience Cloud, and more.
The outage was so severe that even Salesforce’s status page became inaccessible, forcing updates to be posted elsewhere. The root cause was a misapplied DNS change intended for a new Hyperforce environment in Australia, which was deployed too quickly without a staggered rollout, triggering a cascading failure.
Salesforce restored services gradually, with full recovery declared by 02:20 UTC on May 12. Customers using multi-factor authentication faced prolonged login issues even after core services returned.
This incident highlights a critical best practice that StatusGator always recommends: host your status page on a separate domain to ensure it remains reachable during platform-wide outages. Salesforce’s inaccessible status page compounded customer confusion, something that could have been avoided with this simple precaution.
October 2020: Salesforce Commerce Cloud Authentication Outage
On October 1 at 14:43 UTC, Salesforce faced a significant outage lasting 15 hours and 28 minutes. It impacted the Commerce Cloud production environment, particularly the Account Manager, the authentication service for Business Manager.
This disruption left customers unable to access their production, staging, and development environments, resulting in frustrating internal server errors.
The issue stemmed from an overwhelming amount of traffic that overloaded the Account Manager, causing authentication failures.
Despite efforts to restart the service and implement rate limits, the team ultimately had to switch to a standby environment. After that, they managed DNS propagation and kept a close eye on performance. Full service was restored by 06:11 UTC on October 2.
Conclusion
Salesforce’s outage history highlights just how disruptive even short-lived service incidents can be. Whether they’re caused by DNS misconfigurations, traffic spikes, or human error.
For enterprises that rely on Salesforce, early awareness and visibility into platform health are critical for maintaining business continuity.
That’s where StatusGator shines. By aggregating status data across thousands of cloud services, including Salesforce, StatusGator delivers centralized monitoring, historical uptime insights, and real-time alerts when services degrade or go offline.
Our Early Warning Signals even alert you to potential disruptions before providers publish their official updates.
If your organization depends on multiple SaaS tools, monitoring them all from a single dashboard isn’t just convenient – it’s essential.
Learn how you can gain peace of mind by tracking Salesforce status and its services and regions from one place.
