Salesforce continues to stumble after critical outage

Salesforce recently suffered a critical outage after it was discovered that customer data was vulnerable. An apparent bug in the system caused all permissions to be granted to every single profile in some orgs. This included standard profiles and custom profiles.

This meant that users didn't just get read access, but they also received write permissions, making it easy for malicious agents tamper with a company's data.

Salesforce CEO Parker Harris updated via Twitter, "To all of our Salesforce customers, please be aware that we are experiencing a major issue with our service and apologise for the impact it is having on you. Please know that we have all hands on this issue and are resolving as quickly as possible.

"We have had to disable access to our service to customers affected in order to help resolve the issue. We expect to be able to restore access soon as we continue to work through this issue.

Salesforce customers in the EU and North America were impacted the most by the shutdown. The script supposedly only impacted customers of Salesforce Pardot, however, the company decided to take down all other Salesforce services, for both current and former Pardot customers.

Salesforce has supposedly been working over the weekend to restore access to customers, however, they are still limping along after the incident.

An update from yesterday states, "We restored administrators' access to orgs affected by the recent permissions issue. In parallel, we ran an automated provisioning fix to restore user permissions to where they were before the incident occurred.

"The automated provisioning has been run on most instances, including NA57. We continue to work on a fix for the remaining instances. If you are still experiencing issues with your user permissions, we have prepared a set of instructions for admins to manually restore them.

"While the permissions issue did not affect every Pardot customer, we did disable jobs that sync data between Pardot and the Salesforce application in order to protect the integrity of our customers' data.

"As we work to restore permissions to affected orgs, we are also working to reenable sync between Pardot and the Salesforce application for those orgs that have not been affected or have had their permissions fixed. Data from interactions with Pardot is being queued and will resume processing back to the CRM once it is safe to do so.

Needless to say that Salesforce users are less than impressed at the moment.