Salesforce.com outage disrupts business

Salesforce.com customers were unable to access the firm's online sales systems on Tuesday due to an apparent outage that lasted most of the day.

Salesforce stores customer information for thousands of businesses, delivering the data via the Web. The lack of that data on Tuesday disrupted some customers' sales activities on a critical pre-holiday business day.

"This is not just an inconvenience. We're losing sales," said Charlie Crystle, CEO of Mission Research in Lancaster, Pa. "It's a busy time of the year."

It's unclear how many of Salesforce's 18,700 customers were in the same boat or what caused the outage. But complaints from other affected customers are surfacing on the Web. The SalesForceWatch blog has a round-up of reports.

Salesforce appeared to be back up and running on Wednesday, Crystle said.

Salesforce representatives have not returned CNET News.com's calls, and the customer service staff is offering almost no explanation to customers, Crystle said.

Crystle is also peeved that Salesforce never notified him of the problem and a customer service rep was not able to tell him when it would be fixed. A promised follow-up call from a Salesforce account rep never materialized either.

"I wonder if we're in the cheap seats," he said. "I wonder if the small customers get relegated to a cheaper service solution or something like that."

Mission Research, a software startup, has six Salesforce.com subscribers.