Small-business owners are feeling the impacts of the ongoing Salesforce platform outage, which has reportedly caused power outages in parts of the United States and Canada since April 2013. According to reports, this outage has prevented small businesses from accessing their Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system. Because most small businesses rely heavily on their CRM system to track customers, store data, and market products and services, the outage has resulted in significant lost revenue. Estimates suggest that Salesforce’s outage could cost small businesses millions of dollars in lost revenue. Many small-business owners have also had to hire additional personnel in order to keep up with the backlog of work caused by the outage. The situation is even worse for international customers, who have reported being without access for several weeks or more. To make matters worse, there is currently no estimated timeline for when the Salesforce platform will return to normal.
