Salesforce.com experiencing outages
According to both user complaints and Salesforce.com's own monitoring site, the company is again experiences outages.
The current statement from Trust.Salesforce.com, the company's self-monitoring site that was launched in February, says the following:
"An issue in the cache server has caused the performance degradation and intermittent availability on the NA1 service.
We have taken the following steps to address the issue:
1. At 8:11 PDT cache servers became overloaded.
2. Operations team diagnosed the problem as a software issue.
3. Operations team rolled back the code and restarted the cache servers.
4. Team determined cache server restart with rolled-back code was not the remedy.
5. Operations removed cache servers from the configuration.
With this last step we have stabilized availability with the side effect of slower page times.
Operators continue to actively work on the issue. We will update this site as we know more."
The site had previously estimated, "a full recovery by 12:15pm PDT."
That didn't happen. This is nothing new to clients: Salesforce.com was plagued with intermittent outages in late December 2005, in some cases leaving clients without access to data for an entire day.
According to Bruce Francis, VP of corporate strategy, "There have been intermittent login issues over several hours today. This affected mostly users in North America. Every engineer at Salesforce.com is working on this problem right now."
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. E-mail her at candacelombardi@gmail.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. 
