The San Francisco-based CRM and application services provider acknowledged the glitch last Monday, just weeks after a major crash in December that was caused by a database-related problem.

"The system is running normally now," said Chief Strategist Bruce Francis. "We know that what our customers want most is continued improvements in reliability and availability, and we are always working on that."

Although none of the half-dozen users interviewed said the outages were causing them to consider dumping the vendor, a couple of them suggested actions that Salesforce.com could take to mitigate problems caused by downtime.

"When Salesforce.com goes down, everyone in the company is affected," said Tom Kramer, president of Bella Pictures. The San Francisco-based wedding photography company has used Salesforce.com for two years, and Kramer said the service has been "instrumental" to the company's growth.

He said that Bella employees can continue to work during outages that last less than an hour, even if productivity suffers a bit. On the other hand, Kramer said, outages lasting two hours or more can be "much more dramatic."