In late August 2025, Salesloft discovered a serious security incident involving its Drift platform. The fallout was immediate and disruptive: Salesforce disabled its integration with Salesloft, leaving customers unable to sync critical sales data for nearly two weeks. For companies relying on these connections to power revenue operations, the downtime wasn’t just inconvenient — it had real business impact.
This incident highlights a larger truth about modern business: integrations are both powerful and fragile. When one link in your tech stack is compromised, the ripple effects can stall sales, delay reporting, and undermine customer trust.
So, what can businesses learn from this disruption? And how can you prepare for — or respond to — an integration outage like this?
1. Accept That No Integration Is Risk-Free
Every system you connect — Salesforce, Salesloft, Drift, HubSpot, Slack, and beyond — increases your exposure to risk. Each integration means sharing data and authentication tokens, which can be compromised. Even if your own systems are secure, a vulnerability in a partner application can disrupt your workflows.
Takeaway: Build with the assumption that third-party tools can (and eventually will) go offline.
2. Build Redundancy Into Your Processes
When Salesloft’s connection to Salesforce was disabled, users could still operate both systems independently, but syncing was paused. For many companies, this meant losing the “single source of truth” they rely on.
Action Steps:
Document fallback workflows (e.g., manually exporting/importing CSVs between systems).
Train teams to continue operations without full automation.
Identify alternative integrations or middleware that can temporarily bridge gaps.
3. Prioritize Data Hygiene and Backups
During the outage, Salesloft’s Customer Success team had to help customers reconcile mismatched data before re-enabling sync. If your CRM and engagement platform don’t line up, reporting errors and missed opportunities multiply quickly.
Action Steps:
Regularly audit and back up your CRM and engagement data.
Schedule automated exports so you can reference clean historical records during an outage.
Keep a “data reconciliation playbook” that outlines how to align systems post-disruption.
4. Stay Close to Vendor Communications
Salesloft provided updates via its Trust site, sharing investigation findings and timelines. Companies that monitored these updates could plan better and set accurate expectations with internal teams.
Action Steps:
Subscribe to your vendors’ status/trust pages.
Assign an internal owner (IT or RevOps) to monitor updates and communicate with stakeholders.
Document SLAs and escalation contacts for each critical vendor.
5. Elevate Security Across the Stack
This incident stemmed from OAuth tokens stolen via Drift’s AWS environment. It’s a reminder that integrations are often only as secure as their weakest credential.
Action Steps:
Rotate integration tokens and passwords regularly.
Implement least-privilege access for connected apps.
Review vendor security certifications and incident history before onboarding.
6. Turn Disruption Into a Test Run
While frustrating, incidents like this are an opportunity to test your resilience. Could your team operate effectively for two weeks without a critical integration? If not, now is the time to strengthen processes.
Action Steps:
Run “disruption drills” — simulate an integration going down and see how your team adapts.
Update playbooks based on gaps uncovered.
Treat disruptions as feedback loops for process improvement.
Final Thoughts
The Salesloft–Salesforce outage was a wake-up call for many organizations. Even the most trusted platforms can experience downtime, and the consequences cascade quickly across connected ecosystems.
Companies that prepare with redundancy, proactive communication, and disciplined data hygiene will weather these storms far better than those caught flat-footed.
In a connected world, resilience isn’t optional — it’s a competitive advantage.