Salesforce.com storage fail causes lengthy outage

UPDATE One of Salesforce.com's European instances is enduring a lengthy un-planned PITSTOP incident – that's a Partial Inability To Support Totally Optimal Performance, a whit below our other status indicator of a Total Inability To Support Usual Performance or TITSUP.

Salesforce's ”trust” page (that's what the company calls what any other company would call a “status” page) suggests the EU2 instance has been down for eight or more hours.

The detailed outage description says it kicked off at 15:03 UTC, on March 2nd 2016 and means that “EU2 is available in Read-Only mode. End users will be able to view and report their data, but will not be able to add, edit, or delete data.”

“We have determined that the issue was caused by a storage failure, which impacted communication to the storage tier,” the description adds. “The Salesforce Technology team is actively exploring two different paths to resolution.”

Salesforce operates seven instances for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Losing one is therefore not a disaster … unless your Salesforce account is tied to a particular instance. For users of EU2 this long outage is therefore rather painful. That the incident kicked off in mid-to-late afternoon across EMEA and continued through the night may be some succour, as with business hours ebbing away the need to write data into the system lessens.

On the downside, it's never good for software-as-a-service or cloud companies to have downtime, never mind eight or more hours of downtime. ®

Update At the time of writing, 0400 GMT, EU2 has ascended to "degraded performance" and Salesforce says better hours lie ahead.