On September 16, 2026, Salesforce experienced a widespread service disruption. Published reporting describes approximately seven and a half hours of impact across affected instances, including login failures, stalled requests, and difficulties submitting support cases. Salesforce also acknowledged scheduled jobs not running as expected. Given the scope of the disruption, recovery efforts required customers to do more than just confirm that the platform was available: customers had to investigate missed jobs, incomplete integrations, and potential duplicate records caused by retries.
As is common in providers’ standard forms, Salesforce’s public form of Main Services Agreement only commits to using “commercially reasonable efforts” to make purchased online services available, subject to specified exceptions, and it does not include a strict percentage-based uptime service level agreement (SLA). Because a “commercially reasonable efforts” commitment is an obligation to meet a standard of effort and not a commitment of performance or availability, an outage alone does not establish a breach of contract claim or an entitlement to customer compensation based on this provision. Whether or not there has been a breach of this provision will depend on whether Salesforce’s efforts to make the services available were commercially reasonable, rather than whether an outage occurred. Merely trying to make the purchased services available is not necessarily sufficient, but if Salesforce meets the required efforts-based standard, even a significant outage is unlikely to trigger a breach of contract claim based on the availability commitment or give rise to a customer remedy. To seek recovery, customers will need to analyze whether Salesforce breached any other applicable contractual obligation.
For customers using cloud services to support critical operations, Salesforce’s standard forms are unlikely to capture the full consequences of an outage. To provide greater certainty and stronger contractual protections, customers should negotiate measurable availability commitments, clear definitions of unavailability, and calculation of uptime, and ensure the scope of associated remedies meaningfully addresses the potential business impact. When offered by a provider, service credits can be a useful (although usually inconsequential) financial incentive for the provider to meet its availability commitments; however, they rarely reflect a customer’s actual losses from a significant outage. Unfortunately for customers, even where service credits are offered by providers, unnegotiated provider forms will almost invariably state that service credits are the sole and exclusive remedy for a service-level failure. Customers should insist on removing any sole and exclusive remedy language so they can pursue other available remedies and recover losses arising from the outage.
Customers should also consider whether chronic or repeated service-level failures would necessitate a termination right, particularly where the outages affect business-critical systems or processes. Additionally, customers must carefully consider how outage-related claims are treated within each agreement’s liability framework, including whether reasonable remediation, restoration, and data-reconciliation costs are recoverable. In the event of a service disruption, customers that have negotiated these provisions will be better positioned to hold providers accountable for the resulting impact of an outage.
