Salesforce suffered a major global outage on Wednesday, which left customers facing severe delays, intermittent errors and an inability to access some services at an awkward moment for the cloud software giant.
The disruption was first reported at around 8:30 a.m. UTC on Sept. 16 and affected hundreds of Salesforce instances in markets including the United States, UK, Germany, France, India and Japan.
Salesforce said its investigation found that requests were stalling while waiting for a response from an internal login service, consuming available server resources. The company initially considered restarting systems before identifying increased load on a core component as the underlying problem.
By 10:56 a.m. UTC, Salesforce said it successfully validated a fix on a test instance and had begun rolling it out across affected systems. The incident was still classified as a major disruption.
Salesforce Stock Falls as Dreamforce Takes Center Stage
The outage comes during Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce's flagship annual conference in San Francisco, where the company is pushing its latest artificial intelligence products and partnerships. Dreamforce runs from Sept. 15 through Sept. 18 and includes more than 400 sessions focused heavily on Salesforce's vision for the "Agentic Enterprise."
Salesforce shares were already under pressure before Wednesday's outage. CRM stock closed Tuesday at $255.65, down 1.46% from Monday's $259.43 close. The decline followed a sharp 4.73% rally on Monday.
Salesforce stock price (Source: CoinCodex)
Shares were down another roughly 0.5% in Wednesday premarket trading at around $254.40. Because Tuesday's decline occurred before the outage began, it cannot be attributed to the service disruption. However, the incident creates another issue for investors to monitor as markets digest Salesforce's Dreamforce announcements.
Options pricing ahead of Dreamforce suggested traders were preparing for Salesforce stock to move as much as 4% in either direction by the end of the week, which sheds some light on the importance investors are placing on announcements from the conference.
Those announcements include AIforce, a new interface layer that is designed to make Salesforce data, workflows and business logic available across AI applications, as well as an expanded Google Cloud partnership connecting Salesforce services with Google's AI infrastructure.
The timing makes Wednesday's outage particularly interesting. Salesforce is using Dreamforce to convince large enterprises to place more critical workflows and AI agents on its infrastructure, which means that reliability will remain an important part of that pitch even as the company expands deeper into enterprise AI.
