Salesforce.com Outage Irks Customers

A Salesforce.com outage Monday leftt customers without mission-critical data for about six hours, reports The Register. It says problems began Monday afternoon for European customers and a few hours later for those in North America.

The company, which claims an "uptime" rate of more than 99.999 percent, blamed the problems on a faulty database associated with an upgrade. ZDNet blogger Michael Krigsman notes that on-demand customers pay to be insulated from such upgrade troubles and Salesforce.com blew it this time.

The outage can only cool its attempts to cozy up to Oracle. The company's stock rose Monday on speculation that the customer- relationship management software maker had approached Oracle about a buyout for $75 a share, reports BusinessWeek. Shares of Salesforce closed Monday up $3.93, up 8 percent, at $54.80, but had dropped to $54.40 by Tuesday afternoon.