Salesforce.com criticised after users locked out

Customers of software-as-a-service provider salesforce.com have criticised the company after they were locked out for almost an hour.

More than 900,000 subscribers were locked out of crucial applications and data needed to transact business with customers. Users who were able to log in received an error message, the trust.salesforce.com platform was also down, and so customers were unable to find updates about the outage.

Salesforce said that the service disruption affected all areas from 20.39 to 21.17 GMT on 6 January, with the incident report stating that: “A core network device failed due to memory allocation errors.” It said in a statement that it takes service performance ‘very seriously', and that any further information about the outage would be displayed on trust.salesforce.com as it becomes available.

Steve Moyle, CTO of Secerno, said: “The three pillars of computer security are: confidentiality, availability and integrity. Should any one of these fail then we lose the ability to trust the system.

“Systems provided by the ephemeral cloud computing are not immune to this problem, and although the cause of the outage has not been publicised, I am asking myself if Salesforce cannot provide availability through its cloud computing service, can I be sure they are providing confidentiality and integrity?

“Data owners must ensure that all of their data is fully protected and controlled to the point that no inappropriate use of the data can occur. Providing such guarantees is clearly a real challenge for the cloud service providers.”

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