The service disruption affects major clients like Amazon and Walmart, causing severe delays and access issues
Category: Business
Salesforce, a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform, experienced a major global outage on September 16, 2026, coinciding with its annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco. The disruption, which began at 3:50 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), resulted in severe delays, intermittent errors, and an inability for many customers to access key services.
The outage was first reported around 9:30 a.m. British Summer Time (BST), or 4:30 a.m. EDT, affecting hundreds of instances worldwide, including in the USA, Japan, India, the UK, France, and Germany. Salesforce's status page acknowledged that customers were facing severe delays and were unable to access some services, including the ability to create support cases. This disruption was particularly problematic as it occurred during Dreamforce, which kicked off the day before and attracted over 40,000 attendees in person, with more than 200,000 registered to participate online.
Salesforce identified that the issues stemmed from requests stalling due to a failure in an internal login service, which was consuming available server resources. Investigations revealed that an external dependency appeared to impact a legacy login server, but third-party infrastructure providers confirmed there were no faults on their end. An increased load on a core system component limited Salesforce's capacity to process requests, exacerbating the situation.
In response to the outage, Salesforce initially attempted to restart affected services but soon discontinued that approach. By 6:56 a.m. EDT, the company began deploying a fleetwide fix after validating it on a test system. Updates from Salesforce indicated that the rollout was progressing region by region, with improvements being noted by customers throughout the day. By 4:49 p.m. Indian Standard Time (IST), or 4:19 a.m. EDT, Salesforce reported that the fix was successfully implemented and that customers were starting to see their services return to normal.
The outage raised concerns among Salesforce's prominent clientele, which includes major corporations like Amazon, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and IBM. These companies rely heavily on Salesforce's services for their operations, and the disruption could have implications for their business continuity and customer service. The incident also highlighted the risks associated with relying on a single platform for multiple functions, particularly as Salesforce promotes its "agentic enterprise" model, which integrates automated workflows with its CRM capabilities.
Salesforce reported $10.8 billion in subscription and support revenue for the quarter ending July 31, 2026, indicating the company's substantial market presence. The financial impact of this outage is still uncertain; analysts suggest that a single day's disruption is unlikely to significantly affect a company of Salesforce's scale. Nevertheless, frequent outages could lead to customer dissatisfaction, affecting renewals and the trust customers place in the platform. The immediate market reaction showed Salesforce shares trading at $254.76, about 1.8% below the previous close, but it remains unclear if this decline was directly linked to the outage.
Salesforce is currently working on a code-level permanent fix alongside the fleetwide rollout of the initial remedy. The company has committed to providing updates as the situation evolves and has classified the incident under ID 20004433 for tracking purposes. As the company continues to investigate the root cause of the disruption, it faces the challenge of restoring full functionality and maintaining customer trust.