UPDATED A Salesforce outage is hitting customers with severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services, according to the SaaS vendor's status page. The outage has hit hundreds of instances throughout the world, including the USA, Japan, India, the UK, France, and Germany. The service disruption was first reported around 0930 BST (0830 UTC) on September 16. An update at 1131 BST (1031 UTC) said they're testing out a fix, and will roll it out "fleetwide" once the test is validated. The vendor added: "Customers continue to experience severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services. This also affects support case creation. A previous update at 1010 BST (0910 UTC) by the CRM giant said its investigation indicated that "requests are stalling while waiting on a response from an internal login service, which is using up available server resources." Salesforce's customer list is a roll-call of global giants from all industries, including include Amazon, Walmart, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and IBM. The outage comes at a bad time for the SaaS company. Yesterday, it kicked off its annual conference, Dreamforce, in San Francisco. More than 40,000 people are expected to attend in person, with in excess of 200,000 people registered to attend online. The Register has contacted Salesforce for a comment.® Updated at 1109 BST (1009 UTC) on September 16, 2026, to add: Salesforce said in its latest update that it is "no longer pursuing restarts as a path to remediation. Customers continue to experience severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services and support case creation." It promised a further update in 30 minutes or sooner if additional information becomes available. Updated at 1142 BST (1042 UTC): Salesforce said increased load on a core system component had limited its capacity to process requests. The company is testing a fix on one instance and plans to deploy it across its fleet once validated. Updated at 1200 BST (1100 UTC): Salesforce said the fix had been successfully validated on a test instance and would now be deployed across all affected instances.
One of the main motivations for quitting Microsoft 365 and adopting Google Workspace is spite, an emotion that sadly doesn’t produce a return on investment. The source of that disappointing news is Domenico Scriva, a senior principal analyst at Gartner, who today told the firm’s IT Symposium event in Australia that moving between the suites is also unlikely to save buyers much money. He pointed out that Google Workspace licenses are cheaper than the E5 bundle that is Microsoft’s most popular M365 license, but that Google’s suite doesn’t cover telephony, security, business intelligence, or an OS license. By the time users add all those bits to Google Workspace, he thinks they will pay $2 a month more than the cost of Microsoft’s suite – even after considering the fact that Google bundles its Gemini AI with Workspaces but Microsoft charges extra for Copilot. Scriva said Google’s suite can be more cost effective when paired with an Apple Mac or Chromebook. Mac users get lower costs because their machines last longer than PCs, while Chromebook owners save on hardware purchase price but need to replace their machines more often. Those numbers don’t consider the complexity of migrating between the suites, and the cost of moving. Scriva said dependencies built into either ecosystem are a likely source of migration complication, and the need for user training is another element that those who contemplate migrations sometimes neglect. The analyst said he’s seen some M365 users trying to use the threat of migration as a negotiating tactic when renewing their Microsoft deals. He said that won’t work if you leave it too late, because Microsoft knows it’s not possible to make the move quickly. He therefore advised starting work on a migration almost as soon as you sign a three-year M365 deal, because it takes at least two years to get it done. If you do decide to move, he recommended having a specific outcome in mind, rather than just swapping one suite for another. Productivity suites have scarcely changed in 30 years, he said, so it’s currently hard to see an outcome that makes a move worthwhile. Happily, Scriva thinks AI may soon change that. He thinks we’re in a new wave of development of productivity suites in which AI assists with content creation. An imminent third wave, he predicted, will properly shake up the market by removing the need to use individual apps like word processors or presentation graphics packages, which he thinks will be replaced by some kind of AI interface that allows users to express what they want to do and then sit back and watch as their suite has a crack at the job. ®
Shadow IT risks are quietly reshaping the job of every IT administrator, whether they have noticed it yet or not. Shadow IT itself is nothing new: it is any hardware, software, or cloud-based services running on company systems without the knowledge or approval of the IT department. What has changed is the scale of it.
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