Systems failure at Salesforce
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Outage blamed on bug in database.
Salesforce.com's customer relationship management (CRM) systems failure on Tuesday was caused by a rare, and undocumented bug according to a company executive.
Servers were down between 9.30 am and 12.41 pm Eastern Time and 2pm and 4.45 pm Eastern Time because of a database cluster error in one of Salesforces' four company network nodes. The hosted CRM system is run on Oracle database, although Salesforce has not blamed Oracle for the failure.
Salesforce relies purely on an on demand model, and since its systems are only available as a web service, such outages could be potentially destructive to its customer base. Some customers have complained that its upgrades, which happen three times a year, have affected reliability. When Salesforce upgrades, it forces all its customers to upgrade through the central servers.
However Salesforce is out to prove that it is only a one-off blip and that it can withstand the demand from its growing customer base. It serves over 350,000 users working for over 18,000 different customers and has in the past year added a new data centre to meet demand.
