YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Salesforce Global Outage

204 points mabil 5 hours ago 117 comments

cyberpunk 5 hours ago | parent

That status page is the most salesforce thing ever.

Scroll down. >_<

santoshalper 5 hours ago | parent

At least they're consistent about UX. My only complaint is that it needs more tabs.

dgellow 4 hours ago | parent

I see tabs with a spinner loading infinitely, which is indeed very salesforce like

sunrunner 4 hours ago | parent

Wow, it's almost as long as the Every UUID V4 or Every Floating Point Number pages.

chrisjj 4 hours ago | parent

Yup. No mention of outage. Even drilling down gets nothing more than "Service Disruption".

troupo 4 hours ago | parent

It lists all instances, you can drill down into each one of them, see which services are affected, and each affected service pops up the incident timeline?

Isn't it actually amazing, and not "the most salesforce thing ever"?

arionmiles 5 hours ago | parent

This is certainly a unique status page.

dboreham 4 hours ago | parent

At least now we can figure out what Salesforce does.

sunrunner 4 hours ago | parent

"And in tonight's news, the worldwide CRM solution Salesforce had a global outage affecting one hundred percent of its customer base. We interviewed users of the service to find out the scope of the impact. Everyone agreed that they were impacted, but strangely, nobody could describe _in what way_ they were affected."

adamw2k 4 hours ago | parent

Perfect timing with Dreamforce this week.

sparkling 4 hours ago | parent

Remind me please, what are folks currently paying per seat for this glorified CRUD app?

warmedcookie 4 hours ago | parent

It's this thing called golf course driven development

electroweak 2 hours ago | parent

Permanent cache for that one.

raverbashing 4 hours ago | parent

If I had been just out of Uni I would think this is edgy

Now I'm just glad I'm not responsible for this fire

theshrike79 4 hours ago | parent

Was it DNS? Any guesses? :)

dude250711 3 hours ago | parent

Vibe-slop, push to Prod?

geerlingguy 3 hours ago | parent

They let their agentic AI take over system maintenance at Dreamforce yesterday like they were pushing in the talks

/s (partly)

mariopt 4 hours ago | parent

Could it be people doing Claude/GPT automations and they just can't handle it?

mulmen 2 hours ago | parent

Could be. With a big conference going on and the updates mentioning resource exhaustion it could be a bunch of people doing demos, AI driven or not. Basically slashdotting themselves.

jtrn 4 hours ago | parent

And nothing of value was lost. God, I hate everything about Salesforce. Sometimes I have to integrate against their services, and it is always a pain, not to mention what the core project actually is: optimization of marketing and spam.

chasd00 2 hours ago | parent

not really defending salesforce but OAuth+REST is a pain? Pretty plain vanilla in terms of integration requirements.

dd8601fn 59 minutes ago | parent

Sure, if you’re struggling with weird custom endpoint behavior, or custom triggers and validation, that’s on your admins and devs.

But if you’re having trouble with the standard rest or bulk apis, that’s 100% on you.

felineflock 52 minutes ago | parent

What is painful about a plain REST API?

AmazingTurtle 4 hours ago | parent

You better bet someone started their agents with a prompt "Make a salesforce clone but with 100% uptime"

Bluestein 4 hours ago | parent

"Make a salesforce clone but with 100% uptime"

  ⎿  You've hit your session limit · resets 2:53am (48°52.6′S, 123°23.6′W Etc/GMT+8)
  /upgrade to increase your usage limit.

danjc 4 hours ago | parent

It's dns isn't it

afr0ck 4 hours ago | parent

Classic

ghusto 3 hours ago | parent

No, IPv6

Bluestein 3 hours ago | parent

It's always DNS.-

ajross 2 hours ago | parent

More like 70% human-configured DNS, 25% human-configured routing configuration, 5% interesting software bug.

Bluestein 2 hours ago | parent

Entirely correct.-

(Nowadays any of those need to fit in an "agent dropped all tables. Apologized" moment.-)

bearjaws 3 hours ago | parent

Feel like it has to be for all of this to go down at the same time.

dogas 1 hour ago | parent

I was scrolling to see this comment, haha

themgt 4 hours ago | parent

Never before in the history of global compute outages was so little lost by so many down servers, whose purpose was known to so few.

Havoc 4 hours ago | parent

So I guess today everyone gets actual work done

voidUpdate 4 hours ago | parent

Wow, the intern must have tripped over a very big power cable this time

monkeydust 4 hours ago | parent

Sam speaks at Salesforce.

Salesforce goes down.

No causation here...move on.

hgoel 3 hours ago | parent

Wasn't it Dario

felineflock 48 minutes ago | parent

Huang, Sam and Dario speaking at Dreamforce.

danvesma 4 hours ago | parent

"Trust just got personal!"

ssk42 4 hours ago | parent

My gut instinct is that this is about when all of their on prem servers were EOL and their /public cloud solution was required. This must have had something to do with that

BoorishBears 4 hours ago | parent

My gut instinct is that this is about Dreamforce with the rickshaws and whatnot

jackdecker 4 hours ago | parent

Ah yes. Exactly what a status page should look like: an endless list of random ID’s that don’t mean anything and no information whatsoever

At least salesforce is consistent with their design language

chasd00 4 hours ago | parent

> random ID’s that don’t mean anything and no information whatsoever

If you use salesforce you know what all of that stuff means. Just click on one, it’s not rocket surgery.

jackdecker 4 hours ago | parent

Was really just poking fun at them - AWS’s status page isn’t much better

BoorishBears 4 hours ago | parent

Looks like a region list to me, maybe just with a lot of regions

dd8601fn 1 hour ago | parent

Random Ids? If you mean the “USA324” ones, those are pods. If you’re a customer you know which one(s) you care about.

chasd00 4 hours ago | parent

You can click on any of the instances and then the service that is down to read the updates. It’s not 100% clear but some sort of issue with a “legacy login service”. The latest updates say a fix is rolling out.

ownerr 4 hours ago | parent

Here is link to incident details: https://status.salesforce.com/incidents/20004433

cmiles8 4 hours ago | parent

Dreamforce, wake up. You’ve overslept!

aeneas_ory 4 hours ago | parent

It’s akways DNS or login

alienbaby 4 hours ago | parent

Haven't they got some kind of new fancy ai interface they can use to fix it?

raffraffraff 3 hours ago | parent

Have you tried turning it off and then on again?

> We're no longer pursuing restarts as a path to remediation.

Oh you have

cube00 3 hours ago | parent

Kind of surprised they admit they're going to try restarting and see what happens. I'm sure it happens everywhere but nobody admits it.

> We've attempted a rolling restart on one of the impacted instances to see if that resolves the issue.

At least it didn't fix the problem so they can actually start finding the real cause.

> We're no longer pursuing restarts as a path to remediation.

Why isn't the AI they sell telling them what's wrong? Why do they need to take shots in the dark to "see if that resolves the issue"?

andrewinardeer 3 hours ago | parent

"Yeah, I'm with Rob. Just let's reboot and see what happens"

chihuahua 1 hour ago | parent

"If that doesn't work, clear the cache and reboot again."

jakevoytko 1 hour ago | parent

In my experience it’s a safe way to do something useful while everyone is getting their bearings. It immediately partitions the situation space between being persisted or systemic vs local or caused by long-running processes. Plus everyone’s going to ask if you’ve tried that already, so you might as well get it out of the way if it makes any amount of sense

vrosas 1 hour ago | parent

Followed quickly by "Redeploying with more log lines", the next logical step.

swatcoder 1 hour ago | parent

I don't know, that reads exactly like an AI troubleshooter working through a plan without the implicit contextual understanding an experienced human might bring to either the actions or the communications.

"Oops, we forgot to tell it that this is the hyperscaled Salesforce production environment and that its choices need to project competence and consider brand embarrassment. WILLFIX"

b112 1 hour ago | parent

Restart should be a very last emergency step, as if it works, a restart often might wipe out evidence of why.

So hopefully it's not done often.

_joel 1 hour ago | parent

Been many an MIR that I've seen where after initial assessment, the next log entry was "service restart attempted"

mergy 3 hours ago | parent

Unplanned outage timing is never good but this is really not good.

https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/

Sept 15-17

ramesh31 2 hours ago | parent

Probably not a coincidence

karmakaze 1 hour ago | parent

Yup. Could be that everyone was rushing to get all their products and demos ready leading up to it.

minimeow 2 hours ago | parent

This is what happens when more than half the company is away attending the Salesforce cult-indoctrination stuff while spending all their bandwidth making customers/partners feel good.... The stuff that matters to keep the lights on gets overlooked.

gigatree 2 hours ago | parent

Arguably, making customers and partners feel good is the more important part of the business

walt_grata 2 hours ago | parent

They wont feel good if the product they pay for doesnt work

chaboud 1 hour ago | parent

From what I can tell, the business model is "it doesn't work, but you can pay folks exorbitant fees to 'customize' it for you"...

Also see: Oracle

paimapi 2 hours ago | parent

arguably, this is what sales cares about and the half-measures taken to tackle what must be the Mt. Everest of tech debt at Salesforce is what leads to large, systemically degraded customer trust in products that keep shipping bugs

orochimaaru 1 hour ago | parent

I don’t think engineering and SRE of the organizing company are ever invited to those events. They’re mainly for marketing and sales (which includes solution architects).

dominotw 1 hour ago | parent

this event is only for customers. its not a company event.

jppope 41 minutes ago | parent

Say what you want about the product and leadership... they do throw a good conference.

fhub 3 hours ago | parent

Cause: Legacy Salesforce login service got into a resource-exhaustion cascade.

Fix: Rolling some unspecified fix they proved in testing out over the fleet seemingly very slowly (After their earlier attempts to roll something out faster failed).

Details at https://status.salesforce.com/incidents/20004433

dd8601fn 1 hour ago | parent

I wonder if “legacy login” is the shared login gateway.

It’s optional but everyone uses it. And it was flaky for an hour or so, like two months ago.

lrvick 3 hours ago | parent

Seems it is back up now. Damn.

electroweak 2 hours ago | parent

At this point OpenAI really ought to let us know when they're testing again.

DoesntMatter22 1 hour ago | parent

My thoughts exactly.

bgro 2 hours ago | parent

Leetcode developers win again

stmw 2 hours ago | parent

Despite all of the snark here, in my experience Salesforce SRE team is quite competent. The engineering challenges of running a large PaaS - not just with own apps, but with millions of customer-written apps running on it - are quite interesting, and sadly things happen. The status page makes sense to actual customers, it's the particular "pods" where a given service runs.

mulmen 2 hours ago | parent

I honestly don’t get the snark. The status page has:

Seemingly meaningful IDs

Search

Region filter

Email update signup

Predictable URLs for instance status so they can be deep linked in runbooks

What appears to be the actual live instance status.

What appears to be the actual live service status in each instance.

An update log with frequent detailed updates.

troyvit 13 minutes ago | parent

I despise Salesforce, but when I landed on this page I was like, huh. wow. honesty. Looks at GitHub

So yeah you're exactly right, the snark is not deserved if you ask me, and I'm 82% snark.

shimman 2 hours ago | parent

This is the case for every single B2B saas product. This is like the "bar is rolling on the floor" level of competence required. Please have higher standards for paid products.

eastbound 1 hour ago | parent

What do you think of Atlassian?

shimman 33 minutes ago | parent

Terrible, I'd argue the vast majority of modern big tech offerings are extremely poor quality where the need for surveillance in the form of constant monitoring/advertising metrics deliberately makes these types of services more costly to maintain and repair over time.

Sure there are like 3 or 5 decent services out there (like S3) but the vast majority are over engineered to be user hostile while extracting out whatever resources they can from their customers.

Anon1096 1 hour ago | parent

Hacker News is much easier to read when you realize that 95% of people have never worked on a "high" (maybe we could say >1B requests per day as a starting point) scale distributed service and think it's trivial to run one with more than 2 nines. You see comments all the time here mentioning that their own desktop at home is achieving more than that which belies deep misunderstanding of how systems are measured. Or that unofficial github status page repeatedly posted here that counts all github services together into one number.

ocdtrekkie 40 minutes ago | parent

> which belies deep misunderstanding

I think you are missing the point. When I state my Exchange server is more reliable than Exchange Online, I don't think I'm a better engineer. I recognize Microsoft has harder problems to solve than I do. I think building overengineered, oversized SaaS environments is introducing extreme risk. It's an inherent flaw of the current approach.

Smaller is, in fact, better, because it's easier to operate reliably.

toomuchtodo 23 minutes ago | parent

Indeed, the scale Anon1096 refers to wrt distributed systems is anti pattern. It is designed to vacuum up revenue and create enterprise value with scale, not to create resiliency for customers (although resiliency might be a byproduct of a well architected and operated distributed system at scale).

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -- Da Vinci

jedberg 22 minutes ago | parent

Is it? When your internet is out for five days because your ISP takes a few days to get to you, do you acknowledge that you're now at 98.5% availability for the year, far worse than any SaaS email service?

I think people forget that those large environments are there for a reason. To make sure the service stays up in the face of problems outside your own control.

toomuchtodo 14 minutes ago | parent

In my entire adult lifetime (mid 40s), my ISP has never been out for five days. Compare to Github, Microsoft, Salesforce, and AWS outages that are always occurring in some fashion. Reddit is down constantly in various ways and still continues to operate as a business, public no less, so I disagree about the need to chase five nines and broadly speaking, large distributed systems that are potentially unnecessary for the use case and target outcome.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

jedberg 8 minutes ago | parent

Consider yourself lucky that you’ve never been the victim of a fiber cut. But what about if the power to your house goes out? Or what if your server blows the power supply?

My entire point is that you have no redundancy in your system and you also aren’t big enough to have any pull with the vendors who can fix these types of outages so you’re basically at the mercy of your providers with no recourse.

That’s why these systems are built the way they are.

And generally four nines is considered the gold standard these days. I can tell you for sure that both Netflix and Ebay would lose money anytime they drop below four nines because I have at some point been responsible for both. You’re correct that Reddit has a lot more leeway and outage time before they start losing money but not that much leeway.

toomuchtodo 6 minutes ago | parent

I've contributing to building out data centers, as well as managed colos for others, primarily in downtown Chicago at Level3 and at 350 E Cermak. I am familiar with architecture required for reliability and diversity, from power and fiber in all the way up the stack to the Kubernetes cluster and software defined networking.

temp_praneshp 8 minutes ago | parent

Curious, what AWS outage has affected you for days?

(I hope you'll agree that the middle east outage is a true outlier)

leptons 5 minutes ago | parent

While not a home-run server, the NTP system is a distributed service that receives 100 billion to trillions of requests per day, and it's running pretty smoothly - it's never gone down completely since it started in 1985. It's also very simple. The reason it has so many 9's uptime is because it is simple. Given a low amount of complexity, it's not unreasonable to think that an individual could run a >1B requests per day service.

Salesforce is not simple. It's wildly, overly complex. It's amazing it has any 9's at all and not 8's or 7's. Salesforce offers three 9's, which allows for 43 minutes downtime per month. The current outage is at 8 hours (and counting) so Salesforce is now at 98.9% uptime for the month - there's an "8" in there now. Not good, but considering the complexity of Salesforce, it's still kind of amazing.

gibsonf1 1 hour ago | parent

Hmm, could the use of genAI have anything to do with this failure and the inability to quickly fix it?

Jach 16 minutes ago | parent

It's not impossible, but Salesforce has had big outages before LLMs. For a disruption that began at 1am pacific, the response time isn't that bad. 3 hours total to give up on restarts, 4 hours total to validate a quick fix and begin rollout, and the rest of the time since has been waiting for the rollout + addressing subsets of instances that had some issues with restarting+the quick fix. It's nearly 9am pacific now, so Dreamforce is saved~ (It's Dreamforce week this week. Most devs are either focused on that or on soft-vacation / working on lower priority non-feature-work items, it's surprising anything would be updated to production this week that could do this.) The architecture and approval process of everything there has long been setup so that things can't be changed quickly.

trebligdivad 57 minutes ago | parent

What I'm curious about is why it is a single-PaaS; I'd have expected Salesforce to have the customers quite isolated so the chance of bringing down multiple customers at once was much smaller.

prpl 47 minutes ago | parent

a few things are global (login service) to some extent, just as AWS places several such things in us-east-1

sidcool 2 hours ago | parent

ClaudeForce in action!

elzbardico 1 hour ago | parent

Kind of ironic. Salesforce is basically one of the major spiritual grandfathers of Slop. It is not uncommon in production systems to find that objects like Contact and Account have hundreds of custom fields. Sometimes, you find out that several of them have the same meaning and semantics, but were used at different times. Digging out you discover that some Marketing guy that used to work at the company did some task in a certain way that was lost when he was gone, and then a few months later his substitute had the same need and went ahead and created the same field with a slightly different name.

Doing data engineering work with Salesforce data is an exercise on archeology, psychology and organizational politics.

Slop is basically the ontological and teleological philosophy behind Salesforce very existence. Despite the official discourse that the "No Software" meant no infrastructure, no toil with updates and configuration, the subtext as intended for executives was very clear: "No need for you to be blocked by those pricks from engineering and their stupid, bureaucratic and gatekeeping rules".

"No software" was a call-to-arms to a certain subset of managers that were radicalized by Nicholas Carr's 2023 HBR article "IT Doesn't matter". It doesn't matter that Carr was a journalist and a writer with a masters in English that has never ever run even a small bodega, or has never managed an IT department. Anti-intellectualism and the abundance of capital brought in by the petrodollar that allowed the US government to run deficits year by year while exporting the ensuing inflationary effects to rest of world, would ensure that this message would ressonate and then even be amplified during the years of ZIRP and the Baillouts. Play fast and loose, first come, first served, a rising tide rises all boats and all that jazz. Wall Street favors bold, and the heck with the long term! This quarter will only live once!

Frankly, this is just poetic justice: Kill by slop, be killed by slop.

schnevets 1 hour ago | parent

Something tells me Troy the Salesforce Admin/BD Analyst did not cause the SAAS infrastructure to go down.

And I think you're confusing crud with slop.

isityettime 1 hour ago | parent

I've never worked somewhere that had a Salesforce integration which wasn't an eternal disaster. Have you?

Why is every company's Salesforce team absolute bottom of the barrel developers with super high churn, no responsibility, and little competency?

Something about the product and its positioning attracts catastrophe. That's what GP is talking about.

gregw2 1 hour ago | parent

Typo: Carr wrote that in 2003, not 2023 for those of you who missed the foolishness and insane wreckage that article caused.

The lost business value and competitiveness caused by outsourcing IT overseas to unmotivated parties under Carr's premise is hard to put your finger on but I have seen the aftermath and it's pretty massive.

dogas 1 hour ago | parent

Obligatory https://xkcd.com/2347/

reddalo 1 hour ago | parent

I can't understand how such a huge company can have such a lousy UX.

ncr100 1 hour ago | parent

Is like Microsoft Windows in that way?

WinstonSmith84 1 hour ago | parent

Peak Tech Salesforce was 2010 +/- 2 years - i.e. after Visualforce and before Aura era. It used to be a developer oriented platform and it became shiny/flashy garbage eventually. But all these shiny things allowed them to get a large market cap with very brilliant sales people, it's hard to deny.

dd8601fn 30 minutes ago | parent

VF and Aura overlapped. Aura was just a bad start and janky. We sometimes just did React instead, for a while.

LWC is worlds better. And the local tooling with the cli and VSCode extensions is miles better than the old Eclipse/Sublime FMT days.

zzzeek 1 hour ago | parent

I'm sure the cause of this outage will not be connected to vibe coding in any way

cmiles8 1 hour ago | parent

Salesforce has turned into the monolithic messy bloatware it set out to replace.

Please VCs stop with the AI FOMO and find a few good startups to just go destroy Salesforce and give folks a simple inexpensive replacement.

sschueller 1 hour ago | parent

As someone who has never used Salesforce nor hubspot. What are the core features that has people using these services? Is it just the integration between all the different areas where customer data lives?

cmiles8 56 minutes ago | parent

It’s like a lot of these big SaaS platforms that lock people in to big contracts. They promise the world with all sorts of features and integrations but most customers don’t use that and get locked into buying a very expensive solution to a very simple problem (in this case tracking sales pipelines).

Where customers do use the features and integrations it’s often a giant mess that needs a whole separate ecosystem of consultants and “partners” to get the thing working and maintaining it.

dd8601fn 46 minutes ago | parent

There are 10,000 “simple inexpensive replacements”. Always have been. If you need a glorified three object contact list… you shouldn’t buy Salesforce.

Those just, obviously, can’t do almost any of the forty million serious things that Salesforce does, and real businesses do need.

wronex 1 hour ago | parent

Does it mean I won’t get any AI generated slop spam for a few hours?

imagetic 57 minutes ago | parent

More of this!

jason_zig 32 minutes ago | parent

I was just working on a zigpoll integration and thought it was me...

sergiotapia 6 minutes ago | parent

RPC errors in my Dunkin app and my wife's Poshmark app. Is it an infrastructure problem?