Comment by dehrmann

Most places at this scale have code freezes in place well before conferences. The most likely issues are some launch couldn't handle the scale or periodic deployments have been saving them from some sort of long-standing leak bug, and pausing going into Dreamforce meant some service hasn't been restarted in a week. Historically, Salesforce sharded by customer, so that goes against both of these, unless it's in a routing layer.