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.
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.
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. <i>It's also very simple.</i> 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 <i>could</i> run a >1B requests per day service.<p>Salesforce is <i>not</i> 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.
> which belies deep misunderstanding<p>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.<p>Smaller is, in fact, better, because it's easier to operate reliably.
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?<p>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.
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.<p><a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22is%20down%22&sort=byDate&type=story" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a>
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?<p>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.<p>That’s why these systems are built the way they are.<p>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.
I've dealt with a fiber cut, it wasn't nearly that bad. Fiber cuts impacting my SaaS providers were worse because there was nothing I could do about it.
I've contributed 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. If you participate in the capital markets, your data traverses systems I've participated in designing and implementing. There is a time and place for complexity (in this context, large/global distributed systems), but too often, complexity exists where it need not (imho).<p>"What are you optimizing for?" is always an important question.
Curious, what AWS outage has affected you for days?<p>(I hope you'll agree that the middle east outage is a true outlier)
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 <i>and operated</i> distributed system at scale).<p>"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." -- Da Vinci
Hidden in this discussion around self-hosting reliability are other options as well.<p>Depending on your time and appetite for tinkering with all of this, it's not hard to imagine a home setup that fails over to a cheap Hetzner or DO VM. A manual failover at the DNS level isn't overly complex, and could be scripted.<p>Keeping a database in sync between home and the instance might be simple or more complex depending on needs, but would it really be that hard to have Claude help you setup a replicating Postgres server? If your database (or data files) are 1 gigabyte and don't update that often... maybe just rsync it every night or something<p>There's a thread you and others are pulling on here, and we need to pull it. Hosting doesn't have to be the domain of the big vendors anymore.
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.
Hmm, could the use of genAI have anything to do with this failure and the inability to quickly fix it?
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.
The bug was from 2009, so probably not :)
I honestly don’t get the snark. The status page has:<p>Seemingly meaningful IDs<p>Search<p>Region filter<p>Email update signup<p>Predictable URLs for instance status so they can be deep linked in runbooks<p>What appears to be the <i>actual live instance status</i>.<p>What appears to be the <i>actual live service status</i> in each instance.<p>An update log with frequent detailed updates.
I despise Salesforce, but when I landed on this page I was like, huh. wow. honesty. <i>Looks at GitHub</i><p>So yeah you're exactly right, the snark is not deserved if you ask me, and I'm 82% snark.
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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.
Have you tried turning it off and then on again?<p>> We're no longer pursuing restarts as a path to remediation.<p>Oh you have
Unplanned outage timing is never good but this is really not good.<p><a href="https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/" rel="nofollow">https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/</a><p>Sept 15-17
Say what you want about the product and leadership... they do throw a good conference.
Probably not a coincidence
Most places at this scale have code freezes in place well before conferences. The most likely issues are some launch couldn't handle the scale or periodic deployments have been saving them from some sort of long-standing leak bug, and pausing going into Dreamforce meant some service hasn't been restarted in a week. Historically, Salesforce sharded by customer, so that goes against both of these, unless it's in a routing layer.
Yup. Could be that everyone was rushing to get all their products and demos ready leading up to it.
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.
Arguably, making customers and partners feel good is the more important part of the business
They wont feel good if the product they pay for doesnt work
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
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).
this event is only for customers. its not a company event.
Cause: Legacy Salesforce login service got into a resource-exhaustion cascade.<p>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).<p>Details at <a href="https://status.salesforce.com/incidents/20004433" rel="nofollow">https://status.salesforce.com/incidents/20004433</a>
That status page is the most salesforce thing ever.<p>Scroll down. >_<
Wow, it's almost as long as the Every UUID V4 or Every Floating Point Number pages.
I see tabs with a spinner loading infinitely, which is indeed very salesforce like
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?<p>Isn't it actually amazing, and not "the most salesforce thing ever"?
At least they're consistent about UX. My only complaint is that it needs more tabs.
Yup. No mention of outage. Even drilling down gets nothing more than "Service Disruption".
At this point OpenAI really ought to let us know when they're testing again.
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.
You better bet someone started their agents with a prompt "Make a salesforce clone but with 100% uptime"
This is certainly a unique status page.
Salesforce has turned into the monolithic messy bloatware it set out to replace.<p>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.
There <i>are</i> 10,000 “simple inexpensive replacements”. Always have been. If you need a glorified three object contact list… you shouldn’t buy Salesforce.<p>Those just, obviously, can’t do almost any of the forty million serious things that Salesforce does, and real businesses do need.
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?
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).<p>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.
They're an incredible marketing machine.<p>But mostly it's a mix of the integration network effects you mention, cost of reimplementation if you want to leave, and the good old "nobody gets fired for buying IBM" dynamic.
Perfect timing with Dreamforce this week.
It's dns isn't it
Feel like it has to be for all of this to go down at the same time.
I was scrolling to see this comment, haha
It's <i>always</i> DNS.-
No, IPv6
Classic
I can't understand how such a huge company can have such a lousy UX.
Peak <i>Tech</i> 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.
Is like Microsoft Windows in that way?
Haven't they got some kind of new fancy ai interface they can use to fix it?
Here is link to incident details: <a href="https://status.salesforce.com/incidents/20004433" rel="nofollow">https://status.salesforce.com/incidents/20004433</a>
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
I was just working on a zigpoll integration and thought it was me...
Leetcode developers win again
Wow, the intern must have tripped over a very big power cable this time
Remind me please, what are folks currently paying per seat for this glorified CRUD app?
ClaudeForce in action!
Seems it is back up now. Damn.
Dreamforce, wake up. You’ve overslept!
RPC errors in my Dunkin app and my wife's Poshmark app. Is it an infrastructure problem?
I'm sure the cause of this outage will not be connected to vibe coding in any way
So I guess today everyone gets actual work done
Sam speaks at Salesforce.<p>Salesforce goes down.<p>No causation here...move on.
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.
Sure, if you’re struggling with weird custom endpoint behavior, or custom triggers and validation, that’s on your admins and devs.<p>But if you’re having trouble with the standard rest or bulk apis, that’s 100% on you.
What is painful about a plain REST API?
not really defending salesforce but OAuth+REST is a pain? Pretty plain vanilla in terms of integration requirements.
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<p>At least salesforce is consistent with their design language
> random ID’s that don’t mean anything and no information whatsoever<p>If you use salesforce you know what all of that stuff means. Just click on one, it’s not rocket surgery.
This might actually be one of the most <i>useful</i> status pages ive seen. Its not just random green tick marks representing the entire service that only change yellow when someone gives and admits that 5 hours of bad service is an outage.
Random Ids? If you mean the “USA324” ones, those are pods. If you’re a customer you know which one(s) you care about.
Looks like a region list to me, maybe just with a lot of regions
It’s akways DNS or login
Was it DNS? Any guesses? :)
Could it be people doing Claude/GPT automations and they just can't handle it?
Does it mean I won’t get any AI generated slop spam for a few hours?
More of this!
At least now we can figure out what Salesforce does.
"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."
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.
Obligatory <a href="https://xkcd.com/2347/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/2347/</a>
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.<p>Doing data engineering work with Salesforce data is an exercise on archeology, psychology and organizational politics.<p>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".<p>"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!<p>Frankly, this is just poetic justice: Kill by slop, be killed by slop.
Typo: Carr wrote that in 2003, not 2023 for those of you who missed the foolishness and insane wreckage that article caused.<p>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.
Something tells me Troy the Salesforce Admin/BD Analyst did not cause the SAAS infrastructure to go down.<p>And I think you're confusing crud with slop.
I've never worked somewhere that had a Salesforce integration which wasn't an eternal disaster. Have you?<p>Why is every company's Salesforce team absolute bottom of the barrel developers with super high churn, no responsibility, and little competency?<p>Something about the product and its positioning attracts catastrophe. That's what GP is talking about.
"Trust just got personal!"
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