Last week, online CRM service provider Salesforce.com's system again suffered downtime. It was the latest of of several service disruptions over the past several months to affect the San Francisco-based company, which now has some 350,000 subscribers.

The outages have vexed customers and have given the company a considerable amount of unwanted media attention.

In response, Salesforce.com has been working to go online with Mirrorforce, a load-balancing system made up of three separate data centers that will have fail-over capabilities to prevent further outages. The Mirrorforce system is expected to go live sometime this quarter.

The most recent service crash was an 81-minute disruption last Thursday, CEO Marc Benioff confirmed in an e-mail yesterday. He also stated Salesforce.com intended to establish soon a public Web page called Trust.Salesforce.com that would detail performance and throughput statistics.

Four customers confirmed that they had lost service last week. One customer that was "severely impacted" for nearly an hour and a half was systems integrator Applied Computer Solutions Inc. in Huntington Beach, Calif. During the downtime, workers were unable to log case notes, access the technical documentation warehoused in the Salesforce.com system, or access customer contact data.