Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Outages the new normal

Earlier this week, Salesforce.com migrated a subset of its overall user base to its Spring ’08 release. In the process, Salesforce.com experienced an outage to its NA5 server Feb. 11 that lasted, intermittently, for about 7 hours and affected a small set of customers.

On the same day, BlackBerry users found only a black hole lasting for several hours when they tried to reach email and calendar services. While it’s not clear exactly what caused either outage, the bottom line is that on-demand services, like the phone company, are subject to some unexpected downtime.

Are intermittent system outages the end of the world? No, for most users (though it may seem like it at the time). But small outages may well be the new norm for users of on-demand services, at least for the time being.

News Timeline



From Our Sponsor