Winter woes

Salesforce.com customers complained of an intermittent outage Monday that lasted for several hours, leaving some customers miffed at these latest developments that they attribute to the company's recent Winter '06 release.

The intermittent outage hit around 7 a.m. and continued through to 11 a.m. (PST), with limited access to the customer relationship management software, said Mark Siler, an IT vice president at Priority One Financial Services in Florida.

"I couldn't log-in for four hours and our sales staff had trouble too," said Siler. "The sales team could intermittently log-in, start the customer look up process, then the process would stop altogether."

He added access to customer support was also problematic and few answers were given, other than the company was aware of the problem and was working on a solution.

For Salesforce, the outage was one of the latest that has cropped up, following the release of Winter '06 earlier this month, customers said. Since the release of Winter '06, issues ranging from "server too busy" to "page cannot be displayed" have cropped up, Siler said, noting the company has not yet offered a specific timeframe for resolving the issue.

Salesforce was not immediately available for comment. But in an interview with eWeek, Salesforce.com executive Bruce Francis said the intermittent access issue had spanned for only a half an hour and not several hours.

The outage, nonetheless, also gained the attention of bloggers, as well.