January 30, 2006
"We were not down for several hours"
eWeek article on today's issue:
"We were not down for several hours. That's just not true," [Bruce] Francis said. "Some of our customers experienced intermittent access this morning for about a half an hour.
"We consider this a minor issue," Benioff said in an email message. "The episode lasted about 30 minutes or so."
I guess the API doesn't count?
Update: In May of 2005, I wrote this post about SLAs.
January 30, 2006 in outage | Permalink
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Comments
Those are lies, saleforce.com (the standard interface)was down more than it was up today. I decided to just leave the office today because I couldn't work. The API appears to be back up as of 6:30pm EST.
I'm thinking salesforce.com needs an SLA. Maybe if enough of their customers harass them for it, we'll get it.
I'd really like to know if anyone has managed to get credits for downtime. I have not been successful.
Posted by: Chad | Jan 30, 2006 8:42:30 PM
30 minutes? Are they kidding? I wasn't successful on a refund either. I will however be asking for a price reduction if they want me to recommend keeping this system. There's plenty of competition.
Posted by: wow | Jan 30, 2006 9:08:59 PM
Well, In Marc's defence it looks as though his comments about the duration of the outage were made before the API 'issue' lasted anywhere near as long as it did. I don't know, however, when the quotes were taken in the eWeek article, nor when it was posted, so I can't say the same for that one.
Regardless, for one of my 3 clients in SFDC an API outage is still considered a 'system outage' nontheless. Too many integrations, too many things monitored in near-real-time, and without those proceses running, things don't happen and work stops. Invoicing for example is 100% dependant on the API.
I'll be looking forward to hearing the RFO for this one.
Posted by: Brian | Jan 30, 2006 9:09:47 PM
there has been too many discussions and too much attention on this outage issue. some things that i don't see considered in many of these discussions:-
- i am not aware of exact SLA requirements, but i have seen claims that salesforce is up for 99.92 of PLANNED UPTIME and 99.71 of TOTAL AVAILABLE TIME. even by a crude logic (0.0008*365*24 ~ 7 hrs) atleast that should be acceptable. Let's give them couple of chances to recover.
- how much uptime do we really get from an on-premise solution really?
- i wouldn't classify my company's usage of salesforce as mission critical. first of all we have complaints that our sales reps hate data entry and they would rather be in field, then there is no point in complaining about 5 hrs of downtime?
it may not yet deserve excessive criticism/publicity at this point (like coverage in eweek with links, images - looks like they have gone out of the way in reporting this).
Posted by: anon | Jan 30, 2006 10:05:30 PM
if salesforce isn't a critical part of your operation, uptime has no meaning for you. however, there are small companies like the one i work for, absolutely rely on salesforce and the api for support and sales. its comparable to straight out losing power.
having this happen at the end of the month when ppl are frantically trying to close sales as is, is simply adding insult to injury. we lost almost a day of productivity, the cost of which easily over shadows the cost of the subscription for the year.
losing access doesn't just hurt salesforce's customers, it hurts their customer's customers.
Posted by: =/ | Jan 30, 2006 10:42:09 PM
The standard web interface was down for several hours, not 30 minutes. I was furious - I had a meeting with the president of my company and was unable to come up with the data I needed because Salesforce was down. Their downtime over the past several months has been far more than any in-house system at my company. Salesforce is now in the difficult position of having to balance the need for honesty with their customers, with the need to hide these embarrassing outages from Wall Street and their competitors.
Posted by: Jay | Jan 31, 2006 12:39:46 AM
The interesting thing here is that I sell software services. When I am on the phone to senior IT purchasers (assume I have their telephone number in a reliable system) and I can't access their records the negative publicity that goes straight to sf.con's potential customers is very effective.
Posted by: David Turner | Jan 31, 2006 5:46:47 AM
Benioff needs to spend a little less time working on his book and a little more time on getting his application to work consistently. The arrogance of telling me that I can't tell the time well enough to know that the outage was for 3 hours and not 30 minutes speaks poorly of customer service. As Judge Judy says, "don't pee on my leg and tell me it's raining." The offline edition should be given away for free for the times when the application is unavailable. For the user who says Salesforce doesn't deserve the criticism, I would counter that they haven't received enough. It seems that my sales staff is notifying me weekly that they can't login. The outages are never as severe, but they are a constant annoyance.
Posted by: Jon | Jan 31, 2006 10:24:41 AM
One could defend Benioff's '30 minute' statement if it was taken early enough in the day, but Salesforce emailed a similar statement to some customers late last evening. The NA1 site appeared to be down for over 1 1/2 hours during the day at that point, roughly between 1:00 PM ET and 2:30 PM ET, with the API down several hours more. The Salesforce status web page also indicated an outage on NA1 during this period.
If there is an alternate explanation as to how Salesforce can rationalize this was a 30 minute outage, I'd be very interested in hearing it. Here is what I observed yesterday.
1-30-2006 Full site down 10:17 AM ET, Up 10:20 AM ET
1-30-2006 Search functionality not working from at least 10:40 AM ET through 2:31 PM ET.
1-30-2006 Full site down 12:58 PM, Up 2:31 PM ET
1-30-2006 API down 12:58 PM ET, Up 6:35 PM ET
I agree with the post above from =/. If your CRM system is a critical part of your sales or service processes, outages during the peak business use hours of the day are simply unacceptable.
Can anyone else share exact up/down times noted yesterday?
Posted by: Enough BS | Jan 31, 2006 11:10:35 AM
I'm writing about Salesforce.com's latest problems (I'm a reporter for IDG News), but I'm particularly interested in the SLA issue. Anyone have any luck getting that into their contracts? Anyone get anywhere chasing refunds? Any and all customer experience comments welcome! :) stacy_cowley@idg.com
Posted by: Stacy Cowley | Jan 31, 2006 11:48:46 AM
Exact up/down times on 1/30, based on error logs generated by several scheduled jobs we run that connect to salesforce via the API. One of these jobs runs every 10 minutes. Each time it failed to connect to salesforce, it logged an error and tried again 10 minutes later.
- First recorded outage: 8:39 am PST
- Last recorded outage: 3:29 pm PST
Thus, the API outage lasted 6 hours and 50 minutes.
Like many other businesses, salesforce is mission critical for us. I am a huge fan of salesforce and I want to see it succeed. But unfortunately the current situation feels - as one columnist put it recently - a little like 1997, when the web was just getting off the ground and outages were frequent and expected. I truly want to see salesforce succeed because I do feel it's the best SaaS app out there, and I believe this model will work over time.
Posted by: ric | Jan 31, 2006 12:29:24 PM
Stacy (and others): This previous post of mine -- http://www.salesforcewatch.com/2005/05/sla_penalties.html -- was all I could find at the time regarding SLAs. So, I would assume they exist for some customers.
-- Mark
Posted by: Mark | Jan 31, 2006 1:40:27 PM
Ric's API numbers look on target to me. I checked some of our API logs, and our integrations started failing around 11:30 AM ET. We didn't get another complete request until after 6:30 PM ET. I revise my earlier API estimate.
1-30-2006 API down ~ 11:30 AM ET, Up ~ 6:35 PM ET
+/- 7 hours for the API. If Salesforce continues to offer misleading statements to the press, and won't talk straight with their own customers, then it will be hard to take them seriously on any issue in the future.
Posted by: Enough BS | Jan 31, 2006 2:56:49 PM
The API was down for us at the same time for us, total of about 6 hours. We're a small company and Salesforce integration is critical for us. Honestly I can't believe Benioff's statement. I expected more. The API was down! We were unable to take online orders because we've integrated with SF so much. uuggggg!
I'm a big fan and holder of the stock but yesterday my CEO was mad as hell and asking about any SLAs. Honestly I didn't bring Salesforce in and but I imagine that we don't have anything.
Posted by: Andres | Jan 31, 2006 4:23:20 PM
First I would like to say this is a great idea for feedback on the crm companies. I have had many unpleasant encounters with them and have learned from my mistakes. I have had been with Salesforce for about a year with a decent amount of licenses for my company. Least to say the support was not their, talking to a private consultant was to say the least impossible. The platform was rather amazing however that came with a price both in dollars and in downtime. Downtime means loss in revenue and a unneeded headache. So of course like all of us I started to give up on CRM but kept researching for other alternatives. This led me to Net suite, again over priced and so I moved on. One day I found Salesboom.com, they are a hosted crm company. After a call and a demo of their product I was rather impressed and could not believe they were offering practically the same platform as Salesforce but always less expensive. So here we go I purchased, my consultant a nice Canadian Mike LaRocque assured me he was there threw to the end. Away we go, purchased licenses , got set up, Mike Imported all my data for me, put my logo in the software for a nice personal feel and called me every week! Also they gave me papers and made me sign a 99.8 sla agreement! No more downtime! To say the least I’m extremely happy with my alternative and will give my contact at Salesboom to anyone who needs a reliable hosted crm solution. Mike doesn’t sell he solves and that did it for me.
Posted by: Tyler Bourne | Sep 7, 2007 12:19:22 PM
