Almost a million subscribers were “literally in the dark” today between 12:40pm – 1:25pm, according the system wide outage reported on http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/. No details were given. Some reports claim it was much earlier than that, which pushed the envelope to an hour.

As well, trust.salesforce.com was down, so customers were unable to find the status on the outage

But luckily it was lunchtime, so the paralysis may not have been as bad. If I was an end-user, I’d say, “screw it, I’m going for a bite to eat”.

This isn’t a new thing for Salesforce.com or any other large scale Cloud Computing service. Even Gmail has their hiccups sometimes.

Sure, a 45 minute outage is nowhere near the time you need to surpass the famous Five Nines (99.999% uptime). But you have to wonder if you put all your eggs in one basket, you better have some redundancy in place. Start with off-line access or cached copies on your laptop or PDA.

What could have been another dark moment occurred at 3:05 p.m. Salesforce performed emergency maintenance across all of its services AND warned it may have an additional effect on all customers. This lasted only 15 minutes.

Below is a snippet from their service logs:

3:20 pm PST : Emergency Maintenance – All Instances – Complete
The Salesforce.com Technology Team has completed the emergency maintenance previously reported. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

3:05 pm PST : Emergency Maintenance – All Instances
The Salesforce.com Technology Team has identified the need to perform and emergency maintenance that may affect all customers. We intend to do this at 3:10 pm PST and minimal impact is expected. We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you and will update upon restore.

1:25 pm PST : All Instances and Trust.salesforce.com Service Disruption – Resolved
The Salesforce.com Technology Team has resolved the service availability issue on all instances and trust.salesforce.com. The problem began at 20:39 UTC and was resolved as of 21:17 UTC, during which time the service was largely unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you.

12:55 pm PST : All Instance – Service Availability Issue – Update #1
The Salesforce.com Technology Team continues to work on isolating the service availability issue on the all instances. Please check the status of Trust frequently for updates regarding this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you.

12:40 pm PST : All Instance – Service Availability Issue
The Salesforce.com Technology Team continues to work on isolating the service availability issue on the all instances. Please check the status of Trust frequently for updates regarding this issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this may be causing you.