Incident Trust Communications

What is Trust?

• On the Salesforce Trust Status page, you can find real-time status and forward-looking maintenance information for a number of services such as Salesforce Services, Marketing Cloud, Social Studio, B2C Commerce Cloud, and Experience Cloud.

• Use the Salesforce Trust Status page to:

  • Check for ongoing incidents or maintenance

  • Find timelines for and descriptions of previous incidents and maintenance

  • You can subscribe to Trust notifications so that you’re automatically notified about the service events related to your instance and services.

What methods does Salesforce use to notify customers about critical incidents?

• Trust Notifications

• Informational Messages

• Help banners

• Incident alert emails to administrators 

• Webinar invitations to administrators

• Live incident webinars, including the opportunity to ask the Salesforce executives questions

Trust Notifications

• What are Trust Notifications?

  • Trust Notifications are near real-time email notifications regarding incidents posted to our Trust Status page. Anyone can self-subscribe to Trust Notifications and tailor their subscription settings to the instances and types of events of which they want to be notified. Trust Notifications are sent from alerts@mail.salesforce.com.  

• How do I subscribe to Trust Notifications?

  • You can subscribe by following the steps outlined in the Trust Notification Guide. 

    • NOTE: Users should also subscribe to Trust Informational Messages, as these notifications are managed separately. For more information, please see the Informational Messages section below.

• How do I know which instance I am on?

  • If your Salesforce org uses a standard domain, the URL reflects the instance your org is on. For example, "https://na1.salesforce.com/..." is on the NA1 instance.

  • For customers leveraging My Domain:

    • Go to status.salesforce.com

    • Select the “Search Instance or Domain” text box in the top-center of the page

    • Enter your company's My Domain into the text box (without the "my.salesforce.com" portion)

    • Press the "Enter/Return" key

    • This will give you the instance on which your Org is hosted.

• Why are these notifications important?

  • By subscribing to these notifications, customers will receive important information in near real-time on the status of an incident affecting them, including the nature of the impact and progress of remediation efforts, until the issue is resolved.  

• When does Salesforce post to Trust, and how often is it updated?

  • Salesforce’s objective is to post to Trust within 10 minutes of becoming aware of a customer-impacting critical incident.

  • Those notifications are updated at least every 30 minutes or sooner if additional information becomes available.

  • In certain scenarios, such as when actions will take longer than 30 minutes, the cadence of updates may increase to align with the issue's progress. When that situation occurs, we will communicate the change i to customers via a Trust post.

Informational Messages

• What are Informational Messages?

  • Informational Messages are general announcements that communicate important information to customers about a product, service, or feature that is:

    • Cross-cloud in nature

    • Not associated with a specific cloud or instance (for example, an issue with Salesforce Help or Communities)

  • They can also address third-party vendor issues (for example, with a network provider) that might affect Salesforce customers' ability to access their Salesforce service but aren’t in Salesforce's control.

• When are Informational Messages used?

  • If cloud-specific impact cannot be identified in the initial stages of an incident, an Informational Message is posted. 

    • When the impact is identified, posts and subsequent updates will shift to the specific instance involved, and the Informational Message will be updated to point to the instance-specific postings.

  • Other use cases could include:

    • A customer-impacting issue involving the Salesforce Help portal or some aspect of our Support process

    • A customer-impacting issue (service disruption, performance degradation) but not the scope, cloud involvement, or details

    • A customer-impacting issue involving a Salesforce service or feature with no dedicated area on the Trust site

    • A customer-impacting issue involving an acquired property or business unit not yet integrated onto the Trust site

    • A third-party issue that is affecting Salesforce users

• How often are Informational Messages updated?

  • Similar to Trust Notifications, Salesforce’s objective is to post an Informational Message within 10 minutes of becoming aware of a customer-impacting critical incident.

  • Those messages are then updated at least every 30 minutes, or sooner if additional information becomes available.

    • NOTE: When an Informational Message is initially posted, it will trigger an email notification to all users that have subscribed to receive them. However, due to a tool limitation, updates to that Informational Message will NOT trigger additional notifications, so customers will need to check the message at regular intervals to see the updates. 

• How do I subscribe to Informational Messages?

  • Customers can subscribe to Informational Messages by clicking on the megaphone icon in the top right corner of the Trust Status home page and then clicking on the Subscribe to Notifications button at the top right corner of the main Informational Message page.

    • NOTE: Subscribing to Trust Notifications does NOT result in a subscription to Informational Messages; customers must subscribe to Informational Messages via the above process.

Help Banners

• What are Help banners?

  • Help banners are general announcements that are used during critical incidents as a way to extend and broaden our customer outreach.

  • They appear at the top of the main Salesforce Help portal page, but they can direct users via any sub-link from there. 

  • Users can acknowledge the banner and delete it from their screens by clicking on the “X” in the upper right-hand corner.

• When do we use Help banners?

  • In general, we will use a Help Banner when we have an issue:

    • Impacting our Trust site or our ability to post to Trust

    • Impacting an aspect of our Support capability (ability to log cases, slow response times, ability to update existing cases)

    • Driving high call volumes to Support

    • Requiring emergency maintenance

    • NOTE: In many cases, we will use a Help banner whenever we use an Informational Message to extend our outreach to customers.

• How often are Help banners updated?

  • Help banners are updated as needed during an incident. They are typically used as an additional way to raise awareness of an issue rather than as the primary vehicle to provide updates on an ongoing incident.

• How do I subscribe to Help banners?

  • Help banners appear at the top of the main Salesforce Help portal page, but they can follow users via any sub-link. 

  • Users can acknowledge and delete the banner from their screens by clicking on the “X” in the upper right-hand corner.

Incident Alert Emails to Org Contacts

• What are incident alert emails to org contacts?

  • Emails are sent to Salesforce org admin contacts with information about the incident or an invitation to a Salesforce incident webinar. The emails for Sales and Service Cloud incidents are also sent to designated contacts on the org.

• When are incident alert emails to org contacts sent?

  • An initial alert is sent when an incident a highly impactful incident has been declared affecting or potentially affecting an org.  

  • A Salesforce incident webinar invitation is sent approximately 30 minutes before the webinar begins. 

  • An incident resolution alert is sent when the service has been restored.

• How are the incident alert emails different from Trust notifications? 

  • These emails are sent to org admins and, in some cases, additional designated contacts.

  • These emails can include invitations to live Salesforce incident webinars. 

Salesforce Incident Webinars

• What are Salesforce incident webinars?

  • Live incident webinars occur for incidents that affect multiple customers. You can learn more about our actions to restore your service during these webinars. These are hosted by senior Salesforce Executives who outline the activities underway and answer your live questions during the webinar. 

• When are Salesforce Incident Webinars hosted?

  • The Salesforce incident response team hosts live within 60 minutes of the start of our critical incident response. We repeat these periodically during the incident, where new information is shared and questions are answered.  

• How do I get invited?

  • Ensure your org’s admin contact details are up to date so you receive the invitations. 

• Where can I learn more about critical incidents at Salesforce?

  • Take the customer Trailhead badge on Critical Incident Management at Salesforce.