Salesforce.com outage has customers tweeting

Salesforce.com customers were abuzz on Twitter Thursday morning as the result of what they described as a North American outage of the cloud computing service.

Salesforce.com's own Twitter account did not discuss the outage initially. Customers at first reported that the Trust.Salesforce.com service monitoring site was down and that when it resurfaced that it was showing all green lights despite the apparent outage of Salesforce.com software instances, which go by names such as NA5 and NA6. Eventually, the Trust site resurfaced and included a notice time-stamped 10:25 EST that there had been a service disruption for all instances and 21 minutes later, a notice that the disruption had been resolved and including an apology "for an inconvenience"  (though no explanation of what went wrong). 

Also read: From Sidekick to Gmail: A short history of cloud computing outages

One customer wrote to Network World saying: "Just thought to let you guys know that Salesforce.com is having a major outage right now!! It is almost completely inaccessible, which means zero productivity for their customers, like me!!!"

Tweeter Morseworks wrote: "Salesforce.com's reliability is helping the competition and hurting the argument for SAAS."

Certified Salesforce.com admin Mikegerholdttweeted: "So coming in to work and having #Salesforcego down is like waking up and being set on fire."

One less dramatic Salesforce.com consultant described the awkwardness of having the service fail during a training session with "a lot of people on the phone."

Meanwhile, she and various customers on Twitter expressed relief that the outage didn't last long, with one noting that you shouldn't look down on cloud computing because of the incident since local servers go down too.

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