Workday Down: Payroll and HR Platform Used by 11,500 Companies Offline

Workday, the payroll and human resources software used by large employers and government agencies, went down Friday evening. Users who tried to sign in saw a message that the service was unavailable, and the company confirmed the disruption in a statement reported by Fox Business. Downdetector, a site that tracks user reports, showed a spike of nearly 3,000 Workday problem reports shortly after 5 p.m. Friday, according to Fox Business. The outlet did not give a time zone.

Workday handles services for 11,500 companies, so the outage could reach employees at many large organizations at once. The company has not given an estimate for when access will return.

What Workday users are seeing

People trying to reach the platform got a notice saying Workday was “currently unavailable” and that the company was dealing with a service interruption. The notice said service would come back as soon as possible and apologized for the trouble.

It also asked Workday customers who need more help to contact the Workday administrator inside their own organization, and told everyone else to check back later. That is the only official guidance so far. Individual employees generally reach Workday through their employer’s account, so questions about pay or HR tasks go to that internal administrator, not to Workday directly.

What Workday has said about the cause

A Workday spokesperson told FOX LiveNOW that some customers were facing a service disruption and that the company was working urgently to investigate and fix it. The spokesperson also apologized to affected customers.

Workday told the San Francisco Chronicle that the disruption happened after it found a problem while testing backup systems. The company has not shared more technical detail, and it has not said how many customers lost access. Fox Business said it contacted Workday for comment and did not immediately hear back.

Who may be affected

Workday’s customer list includes major retailers. Fox Business named Walmart and Target among those potentially affected, though it did not confirm that either company lost access. Other Workday clients named in the report include Netflix, Salesforce, PNC Bank, Chipotle, Southwest Airlines, General Electric and Nasdaq.

The platform is also used in the public sector. According to Fox Business, its government customers include the cities of Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Charlotte and Denver, along with the U.S. Department of Energy. Workday lists NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a client as well.

What it means for employees and employers

Workday is the system many organizations use to run payroll and manage HR records. While it is offline, staff at customer organizations may be unable to log in to tasks they normally handle there, and HR teams lose access to the tool they use to manage those records. Workday has not said whether payroll runs or other scheduled processes were affected, and no timeline for a fix has been announced.

A second big business software outage this week

The Workday disruption came days after a large global Microsoft outage that hit Outlook email and the Teams messaging platform, according to Fox Business. That makes it the second major outage of widely used business software in recent days.

Source: Fox Business