Salesforce resolves massive outage with gradual access restoration

Salesforce users were taken aback last week when the platform experienced a massive outage after the deployment of a database script inadvertently gave users broader access than intended.

The San Francisco-based cloud software giant initially blocked access to all instances of its software for organizations affected by the database script flaw. Once Salesforce was able to isolate the affected organizations, it restored access for non-affected organizations.

The outage itself was caused by a faulty Pardot database script which allowed users to view and edit all of their company's data regardless of their permission settings.

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As of Saturday, customers who were unaffected by the database script issue had their full access restored while Salesforce only restored access to users with a system administrator profile if their organization had been affected by the flaw.

Salesforce outage

Organizations with a valid backup of their profiles and user permission data were able to deploy that information directly from a Sandbox copy to the production environment on Saturday.

However, if a Salesforce customer lacks a Sandbox containing production profiles and permission sets, the company said that admins would have to manually modify the configurations to grant appropriate access to users.

In total, the outage lasted for 15 hours before administrators regained access to Salesforce.

By moving their critical applications to the cloud, organizations can cut costs while allowing employees to access them from anywhere but the recent Salesforce outage is a prime example of how cloud apps can also leave businesses open to a loss in productivity when a system does go down.