Salesforce suffers global outage during Dreamforce conference

Salesforce ↘ 1.46% experienced a global service disruption on Wednesday, leaving customers across all regions unable to access core services — an embarrassing stumble that coincided with the company's marquee Dreamforce 2026 conference in San Francisco.

Outage Hits During Flagship Event

The disruption began at 7:50 UTC on September 16, with Salesforce confirming that multiple instances across all regions were affected. Customers reported severe delays, intermittent errors, and in some cases a complete inability to access services. "During a service disruption, end users can't access the service," Salesforce noted on its status page.miragenews+1

The timing was particularly awkward. Dreamforce 2026, the company's three-day flagship conference running September 15–17 at San Francisco's Moscone Center, had just entered its second day. The event brings together customers, developers, and technology leaders, with sessions spanning more than 1,200 breakouts, keynotes, and workshops.salesforce+1

AI Announcements Overshadowed

Salesforce had been using Dreamforce to showcase its latest artificial intelligence offerings, including AIforce, which allows AI systems to interact with data and workflows held inside Salesforce, and Claudeforce, a beta integration bringing Salesforce tools directly into Anthropic's Claude assistant. Those product launches were overshadowed as reports of the outage spread across user forums and outage tracking services. DownDetector UK recorded a surge in user reports beginning around 9:05 BST, while the monitoring service IsDown logged 52 user reports in the 24 hours surrounding the incident.designtaxi+2

Cause Unknown as Investigation Continues

As of early Wednesday morning, Salesforce had not disclosed the root cause. "We're investigating an issue impacting multiple instances across all regions where customers may experience severe delays, intermittent errors, or an inability to access some services," the company said. The incident is being tracked internally under ID 20004433.thecybersecguru+1

Salesforce has a history of periodic outages — IsDown reported 158 incidents, including 20 major outages, over the preceding 90 days. But few have carried the reputational sting of a disruption timed to the company's most visible annual gathering.isdown