A new Salesforce outage in January 2026 proves once again that costly SaaS disruptions can strike at any time. This wasn’t the only time that Salesforce has gone down in recent years – and it won’t be the last either.
In this post, we take a closer look at recent Salesforce outages and how companies can protect their CRM data with SaaS backup and other tools.
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What We Know about the 2026 Salesforce Outage Today
On January 27, 2026, a “performance degradation” affected Salesforce’s Core Services, particularly the USA26 instance and the Salesforce Help Portal (help.salesforce.com). While it was not a full global Salesforce outage, some users experienced significant performance issues that prevented them from using the service.
How it disrupted businesses
Unlike other high-profile Salesforce outages outlined below, the 2026 incident did not prevent users from accessing the service completely. Many could still successfully log into their Salesforce environments. However, they were met with severe latency, including intermittent slow page loads, timeout errors, and dropped connectivity.
Incident details
- In incidental details posted to the Salesforce status page that day, the company explained: “During a Marketing Cloud Engagement degradation, intermittent slowness or unavailability can occur.”
- Salesforce also noted, “Customers may experience slowness regarding Marketing Email performance, including delays in message processing and send speeds.
Support site failure
As users attempted to report the problem through the Salesforce Help site, the site itself also began to fail. At first, it displayed a warning banner about the degradation, but eventually, the site crashed entirely for many users, returning a 503-style error page.
When it was resolved
While the Salesforce status page details the event with multiple incident reports, one report shows the end time at 1:18am EST, with a total duration of about 15 hours. Salesforce has not yet published its Root Cause Analysis of the service disruption, but in its incident updates, it noted the need for “database optimization and component isolation,” potentially revealing a relatively common database bottleneck issue.
Salesforce Outage History
While Salesforce generally had a good record of maintaining service uptime and cloud availability, the 2026 incident was just one of several outages over the past few years. Let’s review some of their most significant outages.
June 2025
On June 10, 2025, a widespread outage affected multiple services owned or operated by Salesforce, including its platform-as-a-service Heroku platform, which went offline for more than 6 hours. Other affected services included Core Salesforce Services, Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Tableau, Service Cloud, Revenue Cloud and Mule/MuleSoft. The root cause was an unexpected system update in the production environment that caused network connectivity failures across Heroku’s infrastructure.
January 2025
Only a few months earlier, Salesforce experienced a four-day disruption that resulted in massive login failures and crippled essential customer service pipelines, specifically knocking Email-to-Case and Web-to-Case features completely offline. Primarily affecting North American users, the incident was triggered by a technical deployment error that caused cascading database configuration issues, severely impacting Core Services and sandbox environments.
November 2024
A Salesforce service disruption in November 2024 lasted over 9 hours and affected multiple data centers, leaving many users (not all) unable to log in to their Salesforce environments. While Salesforce engineers worked to stabilize the system and eventually restored services, the root cause of the widespread outage was not immediately disclosed. (The company later disclosed that it was due to a botched database maintenance change.) The incident underscored the significant operational risks businesses face when dependent on cloud-based services without backup.
September 2023
The September 2023 Salesforce outage was considered one of the company’s worst at the time, as it affected all customers globally. The disruption lasted more than 4 hours, affecting multiple platforms including Commerce Cloud, MuleSoft, and Tableau. While Salesforce initiated a rollback within an hour of detecting the problem, the initial delay in communication and the decision to implement changes during peak business hours left many organizations frustrated and unable to execute essential sales, marketing, and customer service tasks until the incident was fully resolved that afternoon. The incident was ultimately attributed to human error after a faulty permissions change with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
May 2021
Just over two years before the 2023 outage, Salesforce had a similar event. A configuration change applied to their servers left clients unable to log in to the system for approximately five hours. After the issue was resolved, leadership at Salesforce explained that an engineer had implemented a change too quickly rather than using a staggered deployment. This caused the outage to affect a much larger number of customers than it would have otherwise.
May 2019
A massive Salesforce outage in May 2019 left thousands of customers unable to access the service for several days. At that time, the incident was one of the worst Salesforce downtime events in the company’s history, with as many as 3,200 users temporarily losing access to their SaaS data around the world. Officials from Salesforce confirmed that the outage was intentional, after a faulty database script accidentally broke permission settings, giving some users access to all of their company’s Salesforce data. This created a serious security problem that forced Salesforce to take the service offline for all users. ZDNet reported that the issue arose from a change that the company made to its production environment within Pardot, Salesforce’s digital marketing tool.
May 2016
May seems to be a problematic month for Salesforce. In addition to the 2019 and 2021 incidents, the company also experienced a significant outage in 2016. This particular incident left customers without access to their CRM data for around 20 hours. A bug in the firmware of its storage arrays initially caused the disruption. During the resolution, the company had to move its data to another data center, which led to a massive database failure. Salesforce restored a backup, but many companies permanently lost some of their data in the process.
Forced and Accidental Outages
One of the most noteworthy differences between the 2019 and 2023 outages is that the former was “forced” while the latter was not. The distinction is important because it illustrates how some seemingly small disruptions can have a widespread impact, forcing a company to intentionally takes its services offline to minimize further risks.
Why Salesforce Chose to Shut Down Its Services in 2019
A forced outage occurs when a company chooses to take its services down temporarily. It’s far from an ideal option, and it usually only occurs if the organization feels that they have no other choice.
On the surface, that might not seem to make a whole lot of sense. Why would a company want to force an outage of its services? To answer that question, let’s take another look at the 2019 incident.
In 2019, Salesforce eventually realized that the faulty database script had effectively removed all permission settings for some companies. The decision basically boiled down to this: allow those users to have access to everything, or remove access for everyone.
Taking the service down temporarily was the only viable decision.
If they had allowed the service to remain up, then users at every affected company would be able to access data that they weren’t supposed to. This could have created a dangerous situation and a liability nightmare for each of its customers.
How Accidental Outages Occur
The 2023 Salesforce outage was a very different story. It was the result of a completely unforeseen effect of a seemingly safe change to its access permissions with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Salesforce has acknowledged that it could have handled things differently to mitigate the risk of this particular outage. For example, the company promised customers that it would work on new testing programs for changes like the one that caused the outage.
However, no matter what Salesforce does, it can’t guarantee that it will never experience an outage again. There are simply too many potential causes, including:
- Hardware failures
- Power outages
- Software issues
- Cyber attacks
- Flawed third-party integrations
- Human errors
Keep in mind that these problems aren’t exclusive to Salesforce. Unplanned outages happen all the time to businesses across the globe, which is why it’s so important to have a backup solution in place.
Other Ways to Lose Data in Salesforce
Extended Salesforce outages may not happen all the time, but there are several other ways that users can experience data loss — and these events occur a lot more frequently than you might think. These are just a few examples:
- Users might inadvertently or maliciously delete data
- Data migrations may fail
- The system might overwrite data during third-party app integrations
To be clear, these are user-caused data-loss events, and Salesforce isn’t responsible for them. What’s most worrying is that, statistically, they are far more common than service disruptions, meaning that the protection of your data falls primarily on your shoulders.
What this Means for SaaS Recovery
The recurring theme across these Salesforce outages—regardless of underlying causes—is that companies can lose access to their critical CRM data and services without warning. And in some cases, some of that data can be permanently lost. This is why businesses must consider SaaS data protection within their business continuity planning.
Because standard SLAs and native recovery tools are often rendered completely inaccessible during global service disruptions, organizations must proactively invest in independent, third-party SaaS backup and recovery solutions. This isolates your critical CRM data so it remains secure, accessible and easily recoverable even when the primary platform goes dark.
Protecting Your Salesforce Data
SaaS platforms like Salesforce allow companies to run powerful applications in the cloud, rather than installing on-premise software or storing their data on on-site servers. But just because the data is stored in the cloud doesn’t mean it’s protected against data-loss events or service disruptions. The only way to ensure that you’ll have access to your data is by using an independent backup solution.
Why Independent Backups Matter
In the immediate aftermath of a Salesforce outage, customers with backups are able to restore their data while Salesforce works on executing a full rollback. These customs save precious time, and they don’t have to speculate whether the outage will last for hours, days or weeks.
Unfortunately, most companies affected by the outages listed above haven’t had this luxury because they didn’t keep independent Salesforce backups. Instead, they had to cross their fingers that Salesforce would act quickly so they could get back to work.
While Salesforce does offer some backup export options, they’re expensive and limited. For greater protection, organizations need a cloud-to-cloud SaaS backup solution that replicates all Salesforce data and stores it independently in other data centers. This ensures that companies can maintain business continuity when disruptions occur.
Choosing the Right Salesforce Backup Solution
Finding the perfect Salesforce backup provider can be challenging, especially if you’ve never used one before. When you search, prioritize reliability, simplicity, ease of use and speed.
A strong Salesforce backup solution should be easy to deploy, with minimal or no hardware installations. It should also offer automatic scheduling options, so you don’t have to waste time manually configuring them.
With an effective system, you can create regular backups of all Salesforce data and protect everything on your network, such as:
- Servers
- Virtual machines (VMs)
- Desktops
- Laptops
- Databases
- Apps
Seamless data restoration for any and all of these sources is also vital. A superior backup solution can restore all your data or individual objects with just a few clicks.
Above all, your backups should be completely separate from the Salesforce platform and stored in an independent, secure cloud. This allows you to access your data within the platform’s interface, even if Salesforce is down. You can find Salesforce backup pricing here.
Salesforce Security and Data Protection
Beyond system outages, Salesforce is vulnerable to other security threats that can put your customer data at risk. The most common incidents typically stem from human error, such as misconfigured user permissions, improper API integrations, weak credentials, custom code injection and phishing attacks. For protection against these threats and others, companies are strongly advised to use a third-party Salesforce security solution like SaaS Alerts, which automatically detects and blocks malicious activity in Salesforce and other popular SaaS platforms. (For more information, request SaaS Alerts pricing for your organization.)
Is Salesforce Down Right Now?
If you’re currently having trouble logging into the platform, use the Salesforce status page to see if there is a known Salesforce outage today. The status checker is a useful tool for determining if the issue is unique to your environment or a larger, platform-wide outage. However, keep in mind that these status updates can sometimes be delayed, so the issue you’re experiencing may not be immediately reported on the status page.
Conclusion
Salesforce is a powerhouse CRM provider for businesses, but it’s not infallible. As recent Salesforce outages have shown, a number of issues can cause the system to go down at any time, leaving you without access to your CRM data. Companies are strongly advised to use third-party backup and security tools to ensure their data is protected and available 24/7.
Learn more about Salesforce backup and other SaaS security solutions
No business can predict when the next SaaS service outage will occur. To learn about backing up your data from Salesforce and other SaaS platforms, contact our team at Invenio IT. Schedule a meeting with a data protection specialist or contact us today at (646) 395-1170 or success@invenioIT.com.
