Summary:
During this outage, if you have lost access and cannot login to Salesforce, check the official Salesforce Status page (status.salesforce.com) first. If it shows “operational”, it is a local issue, your browser, network or login permission. This article walks you through the process of troubleshooting an outage, troubleshooting 10 common Salesforce access errors, and understanding Salesforce outage history and minimizing business risk from future outages.
Table of Contents
Is Salesforce not working at the moment?
The quickest route to knowledge: status.salesforce.com.
Here is Salesforce‘s official Trust Status page a real-time dashboard tracking the current health of all Salesforce products and cloud instances around the world. This is where Salesforce people can track the progress of any incidents as they are discovered, analyzed, and repaired (with everything from Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to Marketing Cloud, MuleSoft, Slack, Tableau, and Agentforce).
Here‘s how to read it:
- Green / Operational The operation is normal.
- Yellow / Degraded Performance– The service is available but performance is below expectations. Some features may be degraded.
- Orange / Partial Outage A ‘partial outage’ occurs when a service is partially unavailable. Users in some regions or at some instances may be affected.
- Red / Major Outage Major outage. Large numbers of users are unable to access the site.
- Blue / Maintenance Scheduled maintenance in progress. Downtime may be planned and temporary.
During a significant incident, if status.salesforce.com is also unavailable (which has occurred during prior disruptions), as a fallback, consult third-party status monitors (such as:
- IsDown.app/status/salesforce Monitors the Salesforce (salesforce.com) status page in real time and collects issues reported by people.
- StatusGator.com/services/salesforce As of 2004, the most detailed free independent Salesforce status tracker, reporting on more than 13800 reports of issues in Jan 2016 alone. Checks status every 15 mins.
- Isitdownrightnow.com is a quick domain-level test to see if salesforce.com is up.
- DownDetector Good for seeing a current spike of user-reporting, not so good for root-cause information (less reliable than official status monitors) However it is good for checking what people are saying about said outage.
What‘s the State of Salesforce? is It Out of Commission Today or Is It Only You?
The most important question to get answered before going into the time-consuming task of troubleshooting.
If Salesfore.com status page lists all systems up and running, and your third-party status monitors report no events, then the problem is very, very likely to be on your end. Your browser, your network, your account, or a local configuration issue. The fixes are the next section.
If (when) the status page reflects an ongoing incident, your best bet is to sit and wait with the engineering team to get it fixed. Nothing can be done on the user end if the entire platform is down. Keep an eye on the status page, inform relevant folks in your team, and trigger any BC plan relevant to the situation.
The quickest way to find out: contact a workmate in a different office, city and network and get him to log-in. If he gets in and you don‘t it‘s local. If he doesn‘t and the status page shows an incident it is platform side.
How to Fix Salesforce Access Issues on Your End
If the platform is up but you still can‘t get in, work through these troubleshooting steps in order:
1. Force a full refresh of your browser: on Windows and Linux, Ctrl + Shift + R; on Mac Cmd + Shift + R – a hard reload prevents your browser from using the stale cached version of your page. Page refresh (F5) normally doesn‘t.
2. Clear your browser cache and cookies: If you haven‘t recently, go to your browser settings, clear the cache and cookies for salesforce.com, then try to log back in. Corrupt cache files are one of the most common causes of login failures when the site itself is working.
3. Use another Browser: The Chrome you are using. Use Firefox or Edge instead of it or the other way round. Sometimes browser addons, settings, versions can interrupt the Force.com login flow, especially the Single Sign-On SSO.
4. Turn off browser extensions: Adblockers, VPN extensions, privacy badgers, and JavaScript blockers can interfere with Salesforce authentication. Turn off all extensions for now and retry.
5. Test your internet speed: Visit fast.com or speedtest.net and run a speed test. A sluggish, unreliable internet connection can result in Salesforce timing out when the service is fine.
6. Use a different network: Use your mobile hotspot or a home network rather than your office Wi-Fi. If Salesforce loads on a different network your connection may need troubleshooting: your firewall rule, your DNS setting, your ISP connection.
7. Make sure there isn‘t a known issue with your instance of Salesforce: Your company‘s Salesforce install runs on one (or more) specific instances of the platform (for example NA1, NA45, EU5, or STU4). Status.salesforce.com allows you to filter by instance. Look for your specific instance. (It may be suffering an incident while the rest of the platform is fine.)
8. Check your username , password andssoconfiguratio: If you‘re getting an auth error, make sure yourpasswordhas not expired and check if the identity provider of your company(Okta, Azure Ad, Ping Identity etc) that provides your company access is working fine. SSO errorsare often mistaken if “Salesforce down”.
9. Verify your Salesforce My Domain: If you use a custom My Domain URL for your org (for example, “yourcompany.my.salesforce.com”), and that URL is misconfigured or has expired, you might be unable to login, while people with your direct instance URL still can. Talk to your administrator.
10. Reach out to your Salesforce admin: If the situation isn‘t resolved by any of the above, your Salesforce system administrator can verify your user permissions, session parameters, and login history to ascertain whether an account-level configuration is preventing access.
Recent Salesforce Outages and What Caused Them
Salesforce has a significant outage record. This is valuable to understand, not in an attack on the reliability of the environment, but in arming companies with knowledge to better expect, anticipate and intelligent respond to the inevitable.
January 2026 Performance Degradation(USA26 Instance) On January 27, 2026, a performance degradation occurred to Salesforce‘s Core Services, including USA26 instance and Salesforce Help Portal. Users encountered extreme latency, intermittently slow page load, timeout errors, and connectivity drops. A Salesforce post-incident report identified a Marketing Cloud Engagement degradation as causing intermittent slowness and email processing delays. The cause was identified as a deployment change that was deployed too quickly, instead of being deployed in a staggered release.
November 2024 9+ Hour widespread outage (North America and Asia pacific) Probably one of the bigger recent outages that lasted for 9plus hours and impacted several data centers in North America and Asia pacific. The cause was a database maintenance change that was ill implemented and inaffective deleting internal database user objects that are vital to applications. This resulted in a lot of customers being completely un able to access their Salesforce instance.
February 2025 2+ Hour Global Disruption. On 7th February 2025, a 2 hour and 21-minute disruption was experienced by customers in North America, EMEA and Asia Pacific, which consisted of 80+ individual incidents. This was due to network traffic overload + resources constraints; as a result, performance issues occurred and some were unable to login.
May 2019 Multi-Day Security-Driven Outage One of the largest outages in Salesforce’s history, a bad database script in Pardot, the company’s marketing system, accidentally permitted users to access the company’s entire information system. As a security measure the team took the service temporarily offline, meaning up to 3,200 companies could not log in to Salesforce’s CRM for more than 15 hours.
The similarity in these incidents is instructive. Most were caused by internal rogue actions deployment errors, database maintenance blunders, and misconfigured changes not prepared properly. Doing your homework: StatusGator has been tracking Salesforce outages since 2016, and has aggregated and analyzed more than 13,800 reported outages. Salesforce‘s Downtime page lists outages for over 51,771 components, which shows the broad scope of Salesforce‘s infrastructure and the potential for a single misconfigured change to affect many components.
How Salesforce Outages Affect US Businesses
The least of the business impact of a Salesforce outage is in general inconvenience. For the majority (and quite a few) of organizations who have made Salesforce the core of their CRM infrastructure, an outage is life on pause in sales, customer service processes, marketing, and reporting all at once.
One year Market Share of application which use CRM application was 21.7% has taken by Salesforce in 2023. According to the International Data Corporation, more than three times of closest rival. Such a deep penetration of the market implies that when Salesforce performance falters, so too do a wide series of industries and companies large and small.
The dollar value adds up rapidly. Sales teams cannot record calls, change pipeline stages or pull account history. Customer service teams cannot see their tickets. Marketing automation campaigns die in Mid-Stream. Revenue operations teams have no access to their dashboards. For enterprise contract cycle organizations, just a four-hour outage during an important quarter-close window can equal over a year of platform subscription fees.
How to Protect Your Business From Salesforce Downtime
Understanding that Salesforce does indeed go down isn‘t a reason to panic-its another to be prepared. Here is what US businesses running Salesforce should have in place for the next outage:
Establish real-time status monitoring: Subscribe directly to alerts from status.salesforce.com Salesforce will email you when a problem is identified in your instance/product mix. Also consider a third-party monitor (e.g., IsDown or StatusGator) that triggers earlier alerts than the Page.
Develop a known/approved downtime communications plan. Once Salesforce is down, everyone needs to know what to do. Outline who is notified, how teams communicate if Salesforce siloized tools (including Slack, which is part of Salesforce) are impacted, and what fallback processes are in place for key sales and service processes.
Preserve your Salesforce data with a third-party backup. Salesforce‘s native data retention and recovery tool isn‘t available during a platform-wide outage it‘s just when you need it. Independent SaaS backup solutions that hold your CRM data externally from the Salesforce platform make sure you can retrieve key data during a complete platform outage.
Know your Salesforce instance: Your org‘s Salesforce instance (NA, EU, AP, etc.) is something that can be monitored separately from our general Salesforce status homepage. Teach your team to look for their individual instance, for faster situational awareness in severity 1s.
Keep lightweight offline contingency workflows. For sales teams in particular, a simple offline log perhaps a shared spreadsheet where high-priority deal activity can be logged during outages can avert data from being lost in the cracks. Sure, it isn‘t elegant, but it protects revenue-critical information for short outages.
Coordinate with your Salesforce admin early. Many “Salesforce is down” issues turn out to be account-level permissions problems, My Domain problems or SSO IDP failures that a Salesforce admin can fix in five minutes. Avoid wasting hours troubleshooting by getting the right person involved early.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Salesforce currently experiencing an outage?
Visit status.salesforce.com for the immediate status. StatusGator shows that on May 13, 2026, users reported Salesforce working. For other free services, regularly updated, live status monitoring, try IsDown and StatusGator.
In what way can I verify whether it is a Salesforce related issue affecting myself or everyone?
If the Salesforce status page is indicating that it is working and the third-party status meters are not showing any service faults, then it probably is an issue at your end, try testing it from another browser, clear the cache or test from another internet connection. If a coworker cannot access Salesforce on a different network, then it may be a platform wide fault.
How often is Salesforce down?
Salesforce regularly experiences outages- StatusGator logged over 13,800 outages since 2016. Most of these outages are small, impacting one or two Cloud products in a single instance for a short time. More widespread outages impacting the platform for a significant amount of time have not happened often, but there have been several times where Salesforce platforms have experienced very large-scale outages (2019, 2021, 2024 2025, Jan 26).
What caused Salesforce to go down?
Implementof errors (changes implemented without proper staging), errors during database maintenance, network traffic spikes, and misconfigurations are the main reasons for Salesforce outages. The vast majority of the most serious outages identified by internal engineering were caused by changes in internal system.
What is the typical outage duration for Salesforce?
Duration of outages can vary widely. Small incidents of performance degradation (not outages) can be under 1 hour. Larger outages have been between 2 hours to 9+ hours. The most serious incidents of major outages to-date have been between 15+ hours (ie May 2019 security outage) and 9 hours (November 2024 outage).
How do I proceed when Salesforce is unavailable and I have time-sensitive work?
Verify platform status on the status page. Alert team members of system outage and initiate offline fallback process established by team. For high-priority customer commitments, employ e-mail and phone as backup channels. Track status page for resolution updates rather than persistently trying to refresh page.
Does Salesforce notify about outages?
Yes. Salesforce notifies system administrators via the subscription system of Trust Status page. Admins are also able to subscribe for instance-specific notifications via email. Third-party monitoring tools such as IsDown and StatusGator also provide Slack,Teams, PagerDuty and email notification which can notify the whole team automatically.
Is Salesforce sufficiently reliable for the enterprise?
While it has a record of outages, the company‘s overall uptime performance stacks up favorably against most on-premise solutions. Over 150,000 businesses use Salesforce today and the availability of enterprise SLAs reflects the enterprise‘s ability to establish solid practices for monitoring, alerting, and backup, so that your business can adapt when any cloud platform experiences disruption.
Conclusion
If Salesforce is experiencing problems at this very moment, then forever and always you should go to status.salesforce.com. It is always your first stop. External monitors, such as IsDown and StatusGator, provide additional reassurance and can notify you before the official status page tracks the problem.
If it‘s up, but you can‘t get to it, 99 percent of the time it is a local fix empty your cache, use another browser, switch networks, check your configuration of SSO. Your Salesforce administrator should be your first call, not your last.
And if you’re reading this after an outage has knocked the wind out of you and you’re asking how to keep your team from being caught flat footed real time monitoring subscriptions, a clearly defined downtime communication plan and independent data backup are three investments that will never steer you wrong when a cloud platform goes dark unexpectedly.
Salesforce is very powerful enterprise software. Building your business to be resilient to the occasional downtime is simply good business continuity, not a reflection on the platform itself.