Salesforce.com launches site to report outages

In the wake of a series of outages of its software service, Salesforce.com today launched a new Web site to alert customers to problems with its system.

The site, http://trust.salesforce.com, displays the system status for the four regions covered by the company with a green, yellow or red light indicating if the instance is available, suffering performance issues or a service disruption. The site also displays a history of performance dating back two weeks.

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For example, the button under the North American region is displayed as red for February 9. With a click, users can learn that a server failed that day for about an hour and 20 minutes. During an outage, the site will provide an estimate of how long it will take to resolve, according to a Salesforce.com spokesperson.

Salesforce.com has been under scrutiny in recent months as a number of outages have been widely reported. Customers reported frustrations with the lack of information the company provided when the system was down. In fact, a blog entitled Gripeforce was launched chronicling the outages and other complaints regarding Salesforce.com.

The San Francisco-based company said the site is a response to customer requests for more information.