Salesforce is going through one of its biggest outages ever after the company was forced to shut down large chunks of its infrastructure earlier today.
At the heart of the outage was a change the company made to its production environment that broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company’s files.
According to reports on Reddit, users didn’t just get read access, but they also received write permissions, making it easy for malicious employees to steal or tamper with a company’s data.
In a status update, the company blamed the issue on “a database script deployment that inadvertently gave users broader data access than intended.”
Salesforce customers in Europe and North America were the most impacted by the company shutting down access to its own service.
#heatmap of Salesforce Outage pic.twitter.com/8BYTefqGg6
— Mitchell Johnson (@sfdcmitch) May 17, 2019
Salesforce said the script only impacted customers of Salesforce Pardot — a business-to-business (B2B) marketing-focused CRM.
However, out of an abundance of caution, the company decided to take down all other Salesforce services, for both current and former Pardot customers.
“As a result, customers who were not affected may have also experienced service disruption, including customers using Marketing Cloud integrations,” Salesforce said.
The issue caused quite a ruckus on social media, where the company has been ridiculed all day. Some users reported being sent home from their jobs due to the prolonged Salesforce outage.
Rare picture from inside the #Salesforce main office right now pic.twitter.com/gAdxgori2f
— Morgan Scott (@MorganAfix) May 17, 2019
So I was in #Salesforce working on a report and all of a sudden…… pic.twitter.com/qQxpBxXFRc
— Derek Wyszynski (@RealSalesAdvice) May 17, 2019
Also my developer made a beautiful thing for all of you:#SalesforceDown #Salesforce pic.twitter.com/0yV7DPJnrr
— Allie Lawler (@allawler) May 17, 2019
Parker Harris, Salesforce CTO and co-founder, apologized for his company’s issue on Twitter.
To all of our @salesforce customers, please be aware that we are experiencing a major issue with our service and apologize for the impact it is having on you. Please know that we have all hands on this issue and are resolving as quickly as possible.
— Parker Harris (@parkerharris) May 17, 2019
Salesforce said it was slowly unblocking access for companies that were not impacted by the database script directly.
“In parallel, we are working to restore the original permissions as quickly as possible for customers that were affected by the permissions change,” Salesforce said.
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