Workday said on Saturday that its service was restored by 11 a.m. ET, bringing an end to a major outage that locked employees out of payroll and human resources systems at thousands of companies across the United States.
"Friday afternoon, we experienced a service disruption affecting two of our data centers," a Workday spokesperson said in a statement to PEOPLE on Saturday. "Service was restored by 11 a.m. EST Saturday, and customers are coming back online. We recognize the critical services we provide to our customers and their workforces, and we sincerely apologize for this outage."
The outage began shortly after 5 p.m. ET on Friday, when Downdetector logged nearly 3,000 user reports within the first hour. Workday, which provides cloud-based human resources and financial management software to more than 11,500 organizations worldwide, said some customers were experiencing a service disruption and temporarily placed production systems into maintenance mode. Employees at affected employers were unable to log in, clock in, or request time off.
Workday traced the trouble to its disaster-recovery setup: during routine maintenance validation, services in its disaster-recovery environment unexpectedly connected to live production databases, forcing the company to take customer systems offline while it worked out a safe recovery path. The company said it would post updates every 30 minutes and told customers that reindexing and the release of individual tenants would finish for most by 11 a.m. ET on Saturday, with timing varying by tenant.
Recovery came in waves through Saturday morning. Florida Atlantic University said at 10:30 a.m. ET that its Workday production system was available again, and Emerson College marked the incident resolved at 10:27 a.m. ET, saying Workday had completed its urgent maintenance and restored service. Other institutions, including Washington University and Iowa State University, were still waiting on Workday's validation work late in the morning before their tenants came back online.
Among the companies affected were Walmart, Target, Netflix, Southwest Airlines and Salesforce. Workday serves more than 11,500 customers globally, according to its website.
The outage came one day after a major Microsoft 365 outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot for companies, governments and millions of users worldwide. Microsoft said there was no indication that outage was the result of malicious or cyber activity, and Workday has given no indication that its disruption was caused by a cyberattack.
