NDIS: Only entity in the world not affected by Salesforce Global Outage? (2021)

Lesley made this Freedom of Information request to National Disability Insurance Agency

This request has been closed to new correspondence from the public body. Contact us if you think it ought be re-opened.

The request was partially successful.

Dear National Disability Insurance Agency,

It was widely reported and confirmed by Salesforce directly that there was a global disruption and outage of their services on 11 May 2021. Every user, organisation and login was seemingly affected due to this outage/disruption/service failure.

Salesforce outage affects thousands of users worldwide
https://invenioit.com/continuity/salesfo...
That Salesforce outage: Global DNS downfall
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/19/s...
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all...
Anatomy Of The Recent Salesforce Outage
https://www.catchpoint.com/blog/salesfor...

However, according to FOI FOI 21/22-1291 the NDIA declared that "NDIA has not experienced any unplanned outages, disruptions or service failures relating to the Salesforce or Mulesoft services.", ever.
https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/n...

Could you please explain or provide the documentation supporting the declaration or claim that the NDIA/NDIS was seemingly the only entity in the world NOT affected by this global outage?

Please also provide the specific job title and department of the individual(s) that confirmed the NDIA/NDIS was never affected by this global outage/disruption/service failure.

Yours faithfully,

Lesley

foi, National Disability Insurance Agency

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foi, National Disability Insurance Agency

1 Attachment

Dear Lesley

Freedom of Information Request: Acknowledgement

Thank you for your request of 22 April 2022, made under the Freedom of
Information Act 1982 (FOI Act), for copies of documents held by the
National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA).

Scope of your request

You have requested access to the following documents:

 

“… according to FOI FOI (sic) 21/22-1291 the NDIA declared that "NDIA has
not experienced any unplanned outages, disruptions or service failures
relating to the Salesforce or Mulesoft services.", ever.

 

Could you please explain or provide the documentation supporting the
declaration or claim that the NDIA/NDIS was seemingly the only entity in
the world NOT affected by this global outage?

 

Please also provide the specific job title and department of the
individual(s) that confirmed the NDIA/NDIS was never affected by this
global outage/disruption/service failure.”

 

Unless you advise otherwise, we will take it that you agree to the names
and contact details of NDIA staff being excluded from the scope of your
request (that is, the information will be treated as irrelevant).

 

Processing timeframes

A 30-day statutory period for processing your request commenced from 23
April 2022, in accordance with section 15(2A)(c) of the FOI Act. You
should, therefore, expect a decision from us by 22 May 2022.

 

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Kind regards

 

Freedom of Information Officer

Parliamentary, Ministerial & FOI Branch

Government Division

National Disability Insurance Agency

E: [2][NDIA request email]

 

[3]cid:image001.png@01D81DD8.7204AC80

 

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foi, National Disability Insurance Agency

3 Attachments

Dear Lesley

 

Thank you for your request for information.

 

Please find attached correspondence and document in relation to your
request.  If you require these in a different format, please let us know.

 

Please contact us at [1][NDIA request email] if you have any questions or
require help.

 

Thank you.

 

Kind regards

 

Freedom of Information Officer

Parliamentary, Ministerial & FOI

Government Division

National Disability Insurance Agency

Email: [2][NDIA request email]  

[3]Title: NDIS delivered by the National Disability Insurance Agency

 

The NDIA acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country throughout
Australia and their continuing connection to land, sea and community. We
pay our respects to them and their cultures and to Elders past, present
and emerging.

 

**********************************************************************
IMPORTANT: This e-mail is for the use of the intended recipient only and
may contain information that is confidential, commercially valuable and/or
subject to legal or parliamentary privilege. If you are not the intended
recipient you are notified that any review, re-transmission, disclosure,
dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon,
this information is prohibited and may result in severe penalties. If you
have received this e-mail in error please notify the sender immediately
and delete all electronic and hard copies of this transmission together
with any attachments. Please consider the environment before printing this
e-mail
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References

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Lesley left an annotation ()

NDIA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer seems to rely wholly upon the sales and marketing statements of providers (Salesforce). Dismissing the global event as something that 'may' occur. The FOI request asked about outages, not log in. Which the rest of the world experienced for 5 hrs

Lesley left an annotation ()

Salesforce link relied upon and cited by the NDIA’s Office of the Chief Information Officer was published on 17 Aug 21.... 3 months after the occurrence

Florence left an annotation ()

That Salesforce outage: Global DNS downfall started by one engineer trying a quick fix

To recap, on May 11 around 2100 UTC, a configuration change was applied to Salesforce's Domain Name System (DNS) servers that resulted in folks unable to access the software-as-a-service titan's products. For about five hours, clients could not reliably log in, and things got so bad that even the status page was unavailable.

https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/19/s...