Salesforce stock CRM fell 2% on Tuesday as the company’s annual Dreamforce conference got underway in San Francisco.
The shares came under renewed attention on Wednesday after Salesforce suffered a widespread service outage that left customers unable to access parts of its cloud software suite.
The outage occurred on the second day of Dreamforce, Salesforce’s flagship annual technology conference.
The company’s status page showed the incident began at roughly 7:50 a.m. UTC, or 3:50 a.m. Eastern.
Salesforce reports widespread service outage
Salesforce said customers across all three of its operating regions, primarily in the US, could experience severe delays, intermittent errors or an inability to access some services.
The company’s engineering team later identified a fix. By 6:56 a.m. Eastern, Salesforce said the fix had been tested in a controlled environment and verified to resolve the issue.
Salesforce said it was deploying the fix across all regions, according to Barron’s.
The timing of the outage put the incident in the spotlight as Salesforce hosted thousands of customers and industry participants at Dreamforce.
First held in 2003, the conference has developed into one of Salesforce’s key commercial and marketing events.
AI push takes centre stage at Dreamforce
The outage comes as Salesforce continues to expand its focus on artificial intelligence.
The company recently announced a partnership with Anthropic to integrate Salesforce customer data and workflows into Anthropic’s Claude chatbot through a new plugin aimed at sales teams.
The announcement came alongside Salesforce’s fiscal second-quarter results.
Salesforce reported revenue of $11.35 billion for the quarter, representing an 11% increase from a year earlier. The company also raised its full-year revenue guidance by $200 million.
At Dreamforce, Salesforce unveiled AIforce, a software interface layer designed to bring its data, workflows, and AI agents into Anthropic’s Claude, Slack, and other workplace tools.
The company also introduced Koa, which is built on Nvidia’s open-source Nemotron AI model technology.
Salesforce said Koa had been trained using decades of customer relationship management data.
Analysts see progress in Salesforce AI strategy
Despite the service disruption, analysts highlighted Salesforce’s AI product developments at Dreamforce.
Stifel analyst J. Parker Lane said the company delivered a compelling vision for AIforce during its keynote.
Lane noted that the capabilities were available for customers to try, contrasting them with previous years when some demonstrations were not yet ready for production environments.
Truist Securities also reiterated a Buy rating and a $300 price target on Salesforce shares following the conference.
Analyst Terry Tillman attended Dreamforce conference and reported an incrementally positive view of Salesforce’s product story and its development of agentic AI.
The developments come as Salesforce seeks to position its cloud software platform around AI-powered workflows and agents, while the latest outage highlights the importance of service availability as customers increasingly rely on its cloud-based products.
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