Salesforce experienced a "major issue," May 17 that made its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products inaccessible to customers for nearly 18 hours, CNBC reports.
Salesforce Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Parker Harris tweeted about the issue at 12:40 p.m. EST on May 17, notifying Salesforce customers that the company was aware of and working on the issue. Salesforce's global, cloud-based software is designed for use by marketers, salespeople and customer service staff.
Throughout the technical difficulties, Salesforce provided updates to its status page. At 1:33 p.m. EST, the company posted a statement to the page that said the issues were stemming from the deployment of a database script that granted users more access than intended, according to the report. To protect customers' safety, Salesforce said it decided to block access to "all instances that contain affected customers until we can complete the removal of the inadvertent permissions in the affected customer [organizations]," CNBC reports.
After unblocking its customers who were unaffected by the permission issues, Salesforce announced on its status page at 5:40 a.m. EST May 18 that access had been restored to all organizations that had been impacted by the permission issues.