Auto glass shop owners across the United States report that they cannot access their business management systems. Owners using GTS Services by Solera discovered the outage when they arrived at their shops on Friday, July 19.
According to shop owners, when they called the GTS support phone number, they heard a recorded message saying, “We are currently closed for business due to an emergency. At this time, we are unsure when we will resume operations.”
GlassBYTEs.com™ received the same message when we called the support number around 10 a.m. EST. Navigating to GTS’ support site leads to an error message with a link to a Salesforce incident-monitoring webpage. This webpage lists a “Multi-Cloud Service Disruption” and “Performance Degradation” on July 19, 2024.
“There’s a Salesforce service performance degradation,” the site says. “Users can access the Salesforce service, but some functionality can be unavailable or running at less than optimal performance.”
At the time of this article’s publication, the “Performance Degradation” issue has been marked as recently resolved, though the “Multi-Cloud Service Disruption” is not.
It is unclear whether this is directly related to the international Microsoft and CrowdStrike outage affecting airlines and other critical businesses, but, according to its own website, CrowdStrike partners with Salesforce on its security.
Ian Hanshew, owner of Champion Auto Glass in Woodbridge, Virginia, is comfortable using old-fashioned methods for the time being, but he’s concerned about losing customer information.
“We’re unable to access any of that information, though hopefully it’s safe on their server,” he says. “If this is, in fact, directly related to this IT situation, then we’re kind of stuck until this resolves on their end.”
Hanshew is concerned it could affect the company’s ability to get paid.
“Each day that goes by makes it more difficult,” he says. “My biggest concern is still on the accounting and receivables side.”
Joe Estrada owns Estrada’s Carglass in San Antonio, Texas. Though his shop has adapted quickly, he was left confused when he tried to sign into his system the morning of July 19.
“My reaction was, ‘What’s going on? Why aren’t we able to get into the website?” he says.
Estrada says he didn’t find the message on GTS’ support line helpful or specific enough, and it wasn’t until hearing from others in the industry that he learned it was a widespread GTS problem possibly linked to outside outages.
Though there have been reports of outages at Mainstreet and other services, the manager on duty when glassBYTEs called Mainstreet said the company’s software has not been directly affected.
Is your auto glass shop affected by GTS or other networks or services being down? We’d like to hear from you. Email Abby Bowman at abowman@glass.com.
