Salesforce.com experienced an unusually long outage on Tuesday, which had the site down for most customers for about 40 minutes.

One of the really great things about Salesforce.com is their service status page, that outlines whether the service is up and available, down for planned maintenance, or experiencing performance issues.  This is the type of public status page that ever SaaS provider should have in some form or another.

The service status page paints the picture of the outage on Tuesday:

According to the outage status, the error was caused by a critical network component memory failure, which did not gracefully fail over to a secondary system:

A core network device failed due to memory allocation errors. The failure caused it to stop passing data but did not properly trigger a graceful fail over to the redundant system as the memory allocation errors were present on the failover system as well. This resulted in a full service failure for all instances. Salesforce.com had to initiate manual recovery steps to bring the service back up.

This type of service outage is rare for Salesforce.com, but even the best built IT systems can have their bad days.

Filed under: Enterprise Web, SaaS