Salesforce outages can significantly impact businesses, as demonstrated by the September 16, 2026 incident, which lasted 7 hours and 36 minutes and caused severe delays and errors for affected Hyperforce environments. Not all customers experience the same issues; some instances may remain functional while others face disruptions. It's crucial to check Salesforce Trust for real-time status and assess whether the problem is local or widespread. The guide provides steps to follow during an outage, including checking integrations and documenting errors. Companies should prioritize building resilience through better planning and understanding of dependencies to minimize disruption during future outages.
Salesforce is a core system for many businesses, so even a temporary Salesforce Outage can quickly affect sales, service, operations, reporting, and integrations. The September 16, 2026 incident is a useful example: Salesforce reported severe delays, intermittent errors, and difficulty accessing services across affected Hyperforce environments, with the incident lasting 7 hours and 36 minutes.
Salesforce downtime does not always mean every customer and every Salesforce service is completely offline. The September incident affected specific instances, and Salesforce later clarified that sandboxes were not impacted. That distinction matters when checking Salesforce outage status, because your instance may be healthy while another customer is seeing errors. Salesforce Trust is the first place to check.
This guide explains what to check during a Salesforce outage, what happened during the major September 2026 incident, how businesses were affected, what Salesforce offline capabilities can and cannot do, and how to build a practical outage runbook for future incidents.
Salesforce Outage: What Happened in September 2026?
On September 16, Salesforce reported a major Core Service disruption that began at 7:50 UTC and ended at 15:26 UTC, lasting 7 hours and 36 minutes. Salesforce said customers on affected Hyperforce instances experienced severe delays, intermittent errors, inability to access some services, and difficulty creating support cases. The company later said sandboxes were not impacted.
| Date | Incident | Duration | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| September 14, 2026 | Salesforce Spiff Feature Degradation | 1 week, 3 days | Ongoing |
| September 16, 2026 | Update | 12 minutes | Resolved |
| September 16, 2026 | Update | 1 hour, 36 minutes | Resolved |
| September 18, 2026 | Service Disruption | 3 hours, 36 minutes | Resolved |
| September 19, 2026 | Feature Disruption | 13 hours, 41 minutes | Resolved |
| September 21, 2026 | Performance Degradation | 6 minutes | Resolved |
| September 21, 2026 | Performance Degradation | 2 hours, 19 minutes | Resolved |
| September 22, 2026 | Marketing Cloud Personalization Service Disruption | 5 minutes | Resolved |
| September 22, 2026 | Performance Degradation | 33 minutes | Resolved |
| September 23, 2026 | Performance Degradation | 6 minutes | Resolved |
What Should You Check in the First 5 Minutes?
When users start saying Salesforce is slow or unavailable, do not immediately assume the whole platform is down. First, confirm whether the problem is local, instance-specific, or a wider Salesforce Outage.
- Check Salesforce Trust and search for your instance or domain.
- Check whether the issue affects one user, several users, or the whole organization.
- Test the Salesforce login from another network or browser.
- Check whether API calls and connected applications are also failing.
- Note the exact time the issue started.
- If the issue is confirmed, record errors and affected business processes before making changes.
Salesforce Trust provides real-time status and maintenance information, and customers with My Domain can search for their instance or domain. You can use the official Salesforce outage status page before escalating internally. Keeping this Salesforce outage status check documented also saves time during a real incident.
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What Actually Stops Working During a Salesforce Outage?
The answer depends on the type and scope of the incident. Salesforce’s September 16 incident specifically reported severe delays, intermittent errors, inability to access some services, and support case creation problems. Salesforce did not publish a blanket statement saying every feature in the table below becomes unavailable during every outage.
| What Salesforce Reported | What Happened During the September Outage |
|---|---|
| Salesforce services | Customers experienced severe delays, intermittent errors, and difficulty accessing some Salesforce services. |
| Login service | Requests were stalling while waiting for a response from an internal login service, which was using available server resources. |
| Support cases | Some customers were unable to submit new support cases through the Help portal. |
| API endpoint | Salesforce said it blocked an API endpoint as a mitigation after identifying an external dependency failure affecting the legacy login server. |
| Core system component | One core system component experienced increased load, limiting its capacity to process requests. |
| Scheduled jobs | Salesforce received reports that scheduled jobs were not running as expected for some customers who had regained access. |
| Affected environments | The impact was eventually narrowed to a subset of Hyperforce instances. Salesforce said first-party environments were not impacted. |
| Sandboxes | Salesforce later confirmed that sandboxes were not impacted. |
| Recovery | Salesforce rolled out a fix fleetwide, manually restarted some affected instances, and later confirmed that service stability and performance had returned to expected levels. |
How Did the September Salesforce Outage Affect Businesses?
The September incident created direct operational problems during Salesforce downtime. Salesforce itself reported that some customers could not access services or create support cases, and later noted reports of scheduled jobs not running as expected even after some customers regained access.
Businesses reported or faced issues such as:
- Support case creation being unavailable for some customers.
- Delays and intermittent errors while using Salesforce.
- Scheduled jobs not running as expected for some customers after access returned.
- Manual processes being needed when Salesforce-dependent support workflows were unavailable.
- Connected integrations and downstream workflows potentially waiting for Salesforce to recover before completing.
Reports from other organizations and users showed that the impact varied by Salesforce instance and business process, which is why a Salesforce Outage should be assessed based on the actual systems connected to the affected org, not just the login screen.
Does Salesforce Have an Offline Mode?
Yes, but Salesforce offline is limited to supported mobile use. Salesforce offline capabilities let users create, edit, and delete prepared records without connectivity, then sync changes later. Salesforce offline capabilities are no longer offered with new Mobile App Plus contracts from July 31, 2026.
Salesforce offline access only covers data prepared for offline use, and Salesforce offline records can sync after connectivity returns. Salesforce offline mode is therefore not a complete backup for Salesforce downtime or a platform-wide Salesforce Outage.
How Should You Check Your Salesforce Integration After Recovery?
After a Salesforce Outage, teams should check whether records, jobs, queues, automations, and connected applications have actually caught up.
- Test important integration endpoints and confirm the Salesforce integration is responding normally.
- Check failed API calls, retries, and queues.
- Verify scheduled jobs and automated workflows.
- Check whether any records were duplicated or missed.
- Confirm downstream systems received the expected updates.
- Review authentication and integration credentials.
- Look for delayed transactions that may still be processing.
The September incident is a good reminder here because Salesforce specifically reported that some scheduled jobs were not running as expected even after affected customers regained access.
How Can a Salesforce Outage Affect Cloud Dependencies?
A Salesforce Outage can become more than a CRM problem when Salesforce sits in the middle of other cloud services, applications, APIs, identity systems, or business workflows. The September incident showed how an issue involving an internal login service and a core system component could create wider customer-facing effects.
The bigger cloud dependency picture includes:
- Identity and authentication: Dependencies here can stop users from reaching applications.
- API dependencies: An unavailable API can pause data movement between systems.
- Queues and retries: These can build up while Salesforce is unavailable.
- Scheduled jobs: Jobs can miss their expected execution window.
- Middleware: Middleware can hold transactions until the Salesforce service recovers.
- Downstream applications: These may continue running but operate with incomplete or stale Salesforce data.
- Connected integrations: A connected integration may recover later than the main Salesforce UI because queued work still needs to be processed.
This is why cloud resilience needs to look beyond the primary SaaS platform. Gartner’s 2026 disaster recovery roadmap also highlights that resilience planning needs to account for identity, cloud, SaaS, and third-party disruptions, rather than focusing only on traditional data-center failures.
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How Should You Build a Salesforce Outage Runbook?
A simple Salesforce Outage runbook can help teams avoid confusion when people are already trying to figure out what is happening. Keep it short enough that an operations or IT team can actually use it during a real incident. Salesforce downtime planning should be part of normal business continuity, not an afterthought.
First 5 minutes
- Check Salesforce Trust and your instance.
- Confirm affected users and functions.
- Capture error messages and timestamps.
- Identify critical Salesforce integrations.
During the incident
- Communicate what is confirmed instead of guessing.
- Pause risky deployment or configuration changes.
- Track failed transactions and important business activity.
- Use approved manual processes where available.
After recovery
- Test login and core workflows.
- Check Salesforce integrations and API queues.
- Verify scheduled jobs.
- Reconcile records and downstream systems.
- Document what failed and what needs to change.
The Future of Salesforce Resilience
The future of Salesforce resilience is less about expecting zero outages and more about limiting what happens when an outage occurs. As businesses add more automation, AI agents, APIs, and Salesforce integration points, a failure in one service can affect more parts of the workflow if those dependencies are not clearly mapped.
Thus, companies should look at retry mechanisms, middleware, monitoring, backup and export strategies, data reconciliation, offline processes, authentication dependencies, and disaster-recovery plans together.
A Salesforce outage should be treated as a business-continuity event, not only an IT problem. If teams know what to check, what they can continue doing, what they must pause, and how they will reconcile data afterward, Salesforce downtime becomes much easier to manage.
For organizations reviewing their setup after the September incident, the useful question is simple: How much of our business can keep moving if Salesforce becomes unavailable today? That answer will show where the real resilience gaps are.
Frequently Asked Questions
Check Salesforce Trust for your instance or domain, then test multiple users, networks, browsers, APIs, and connected applications to determine whether the issue is local or broader.
Salesforce Trust provides real-time service status and maintenance information. Customers with My Domain can also search for their specific Salesforce instance or domain.
Teams should confirm the affected services, document errors and timestamps, track failed transactions, communicate verified information, and use approved manual processes when available.
Integration behavior depends on the incident and affected services. APIs, queues, middleware, and downstream applications may experience delays, failures, or pending transactions during Salesforce downtime.
Yes. During the September 2026 incident, Salesforce reported that some scheduled jobs were not running as expected after some customers regained access, making post-recovery verification important.
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