Antihack Blog

Faulty database script brings Salesforce to its knees

22 May 2019

Salesforce is going through one of its biggest outages ever after the company was forced to shut down large chunks of its infrastructure earlier today.

At the heart of the outage was a change the company made to its production environment that broke access permission settings across organizations and gave employees access to all of their company's files.

According to reports on Reddit, users didn't just get read access, but they also received write permissions, making it easy for malicious employees to steal or tamper with a company's data.

In a status update, the company blamed the issue on "a database script deployment that inadvertently gave users broader data access than intended."

Salesforce customers in Europe and North America were the most impacted by the company shutting down access to its own service.

Salesforce said the script only impacted customers of Salesforce Pardot -- a business-to-business (B2B) marketing-focused CRM.

However, out of an abundance of caution, the company decided to take down all other Salesforce services, for both current and former Pardot customers.

"As a result, customers who were not affected may have also experienced service disruption, including customers using Marketing Cloud integrations," Salesforce said.

The issue caused quite a ruckus on social media, where the company has been ridiculed all day. Some users reported being sent home from their jobs due to the prolonged Salesforce outage.

Salesforce said it was slowly unblocking access for companies that were not impacted by the database script directly.

"In parallel, we are working to restore the original permissions as quickly as possible for customers that were affected by the permissions change," Salesforce said.

Source: ZD Net

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