Salesforce Suffers Global Outage on Day 2 of Dreamforce 2026

Salesforce experienced a major global service disruption on Wednesday, September 16, just as the company was mid-way through its flagship Dreamforce conference in San Francisco — an event expected to draw more than 40,000 in-person attendees and over 200,000 registered online.

What Happened

The disruption began around 7:50 AM UTC (12:50 AM PDT), according to Salesforce's Trust status page. By roughly an hour later, the company confirmed that multiple instances across all three of its operating regions were affected, with customers reporting severe delays, intermittent errors, and an inability to access core services. Support case creation through Salesforce's Help portal was also impacted, making it harder for some customers to even report the problem.

Countries affected included:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Japan
• India
• France
• Germany

What Salesforce Said Caused It

In an early update, Salesforce said it believed the issue stemmed from an external dependency failure affecting its legacy login server, and that it had blocked an API endpoint as a mitigation step while investigating further. The company also reached out to its third-party infrastructure provider, which reported no issues on its end.

A later update pointed to a different culprit: increased load on a core system component, which limited Salesforce's capacity to process incoming requests. By mid-morning, the company said it was no longer pursuing rolling restarts as a fix, since that approach hadn't resolved the delays and errors customers were still experiencing.

Timeline So Far

• 7:50 AM UTC — Disruption begins
• 8:32 AM UTC — Salesforce publicly acknowledges the incident
• 8:45 AM UTC — Confirmed to be affecting multiple instances across all regions
• 9:57 AM UTC (2:57 AM PDT) — Salesforce points to an external dependency failure tied to its legacy login server
• 10:01 AM UTC (3:01 AM PDT) — Company confirms it has abandoned restarts as a remediation path
• 10:18 AM UTC — Root cause narrowed to increased load on a core system component

Salesforce has continued issuing updates roughly every 30 minutes as engineering teams work through the incident.

The Dreamforce Timing

The outage lands squarely in the middle of Dreamforce 2026, where Salesforce has been showcasing its biggest product announcements of the year. The optics are awkward: a company built entirely on cloud reliability going down in front of tens of thousands of its own customers and partners during its highest-visibility week.

It's worth noting this isn't Salesforce's only incident this month — the company also dealt with a security-related disruption affecting Experience Cloud and Commerce Cloud checkout on September 8, and a separate Agentforce session-scoring issue the same day.

What Affected Users Should Do

If you're unable to access Salesforce right now, check the company's Trust Status page to confirm whether your specific instance is listed as impacted. Given that support case creation has also been affected, phone or alternate contact channels may be more reliable than the Help portal for the time being.

Note: This is a developing story — Salesforce has not yet announced a full resolution, and this post will be updated as more information becomes available.