Salesforce users in 20 hour outage outrage

Salesforce chief Marc Benioff has been forced to apologise to the company's customers after a more than 20 hour outage to a North American instance downed operations around the country.

The Salesforce NA14 instance fell over late last night Australian time and has been unavailable to users since.

The outage stemmed from a database failure which introduced a file integrity issue, Salesforce advised customers.

Salesforce had moved the NA14 instance to a new site in Washington DC around eight hours before the outage, after a circuit breaker failure caused two hours of downtime at its former primary data centre in Herndon, Virginia.

Other instances around America also suffered service issues at the same time as the initial failure, according to Salesforce's status page.

The company had been trying repair the file integrity issue, but revealed about two hours ago it would likely not be able to fix the problem.

"To bring NA14 back to full health, we have shifted our focus to recovering from a prior backup, which was not impacted by the file integrity issues," Salesforce said.

It is yet to provide an estimated time of return to service.

Benioff took to Twitter to personally respond to disgruntled customers, who rained on social media in force to complain about the elongated outage.

The CEO offered an apology and his personal email address, copying in co-founder Parker Harris, in an attempt to placate irate users.

"I am sorry for our service disruption on NA14 please email me ceo@salesforce.com so we can call you," Benioff tweeted.

Update: Salesforce said it had resolved the issue at 9:30am UTC (7:00pm AEST).

However, it was unable to restore data written to the NA14 instance from between 9:53am UTC and 2:53pm UTC on May 10.

The instance, while accessible, is operating in a degraded state after Salesforce decided to temporarily suspend functionality like weekly exports and sandbox copy.

"As part of our standard process, we are performing a full root cause analysis and will provide our customers with the details once they are available," it advised.

"We sincerely regret any inconvenience this disruption has caused you or your organisation. Ensuring your success is our top priority at Salesforce, and we’re focused on learning from this issue and preventing any recurrences."