Workday, the human-resources and payroll platform used by more than 11,500 employers, suffered a major service disruption on Friday, leaving some workers unable to sign in or complete routine tasks such as checking pay information, requesting time off and tracking hours.
The company told KRON4, the San Francisco television station, that some customers were experiencing a service disruption and that it was working urgently to investigate and fix it. "We sincerely apologize for the challenges this is causing impacted customers," Workday said in its statement. It did not say when service would be fully restored.
Workday said it had placed some of its systems into maintenance mode while it investigated a problem discovered during testing of its backup systems, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. The company said the problem had left some information in an inconsistent state, which could cause errors when users tried to sign in or finish a task, and that it would post updates every 30 minutes.
The outage tracker Downdetector had logged more than 2,900 reports of problems with Workday by Friday afternoon, and an independent tracker logged the first reports at about 12:19 p.m. Eastern, with a peak of nearly 3,000 reports in a single 15-minute window. Georgia Tech's technology team said its Workday service had been unavailable since 6:33 p.m. Eastern "due to an unexpected issue requiring the service to be placed into maintenance mode," and Iowa State University said its Workday tenant was down for emergency maintenance across all five of its modules, including finance and payroll.
A source told the outlet The Newsground that Walmart, Target, Chipotle and Skechers were among the employers affected, according to Cedar News. None of those companies has confirmed it, and Workday has not named any affected customers. Its message said only "some" customers were hit, so the outage does not appear to have affected every employer that uses the platform.
As of late Friday night, the outage was still listed as ongoing, with no full restoration time given. Workday serves more than 11,500 organizations and more than 80 million users under contract. The disruption came on the same day the Federal Aviation Administration ordered a rare nationwide ground stop, and in a week that also brought a major Microsoft 365 outage, though Workday has pointed to its own cause — the backup-testing problem — and has not suggested any connection to the other outages.
