Op-Ed: A note on the Salesforce Service Disruption on May 17, 2019

We will update this post as more information becomes available.

On Friday, May 17th, 2019 Salesforce experienced a service disruption due to a faulty script. While it didn’t affect every customer, the issue did cause massive interruptions.

To summarize the issue

The faulty script gave broader access to users than their instance has been set up to give. In an attempt to fix the issue, Salesforce pulled back access resulting in many users losing access to their organization’s Salesforce instance- during work hours on a Friday no less.

As of Saturday, May 18th, a full day after the start of the issue, Salesforce announced it had ratified the issue.

The service disruption lasted a little over 15 hours and is still causing issues in many instances as individual Salesforce orgs and sandboxes are catching up to the fix and syncing.

As consultants, we focus on guiding our clients through stormy situations like this. While we cannot always provide a fix, again like in this situation, we always want our clients to feel they are up-to-date and have a trusty reference. Below we share the email we sent out to clients that Friday morning.

A note from Idealist Consulting

We were recently notified about service disruption of Salesforce at 1:45am PST/4:45 am EST. While there is no ETA for resolving the service disruption, we are hopeful this will be reconciled soon. The information provided below was gathered from a meeting conducted by Salesforce at 11am PST/2pm EST today.

What you need to know:

• Those affected by the disruption are Salesforce customers who use Pardot, or have used Pardot in the past. You can find more information here.
• For those affected, the issue is related specifically to user permissions within Salesforce.
• Salesforce is working diligently to resolve the issue. There is no ETA for the fix.
• You can monitor the situation at Salesforce’s Trust Site or Pardot’s Trust Site.
• You will be notified by Salesforce as soon as the issue is resolved.

Moving forward we encourage you to monitor the situation in the links provided above.

Thank you for your time and we will continue to monitor this situation as more information becomes available.