Workday Down: Workers Locked Out of Pay, Time Off and Clock-Ins

Workday, the human resources platform used by large employers to run payroll, scheduling and benefits, went down on the evening of Nov. 13, leaving employees unable to clock in or out, check their pay information, request time off or file for benefits. The company confirmed the problem and said it had put some of its systems into maintenance mode, according to the San Francisco Chronicle as cited by Engadget.

Workday has not said that service is fully restored. The company apologized for the disruption and said it was still working out the best way to fix the problem.

What broke inside Workday

Workday said it found the issue during testing. The fault left some information in its system inconsistent, and the company warned that this could produce errors when people try to sign in to their accounts or finish tasks inside the platform. To deal with it, Workday switched parts of its service into maintenance mode, a state in which a system is taken partly offline so engineers can work on it.

For employees, that meant everyday HR tasks stopped working. Workers who rely on Workday to record their hours could not clock in or out, and people trying to look up pay details or submit time-off and benefits requests were blocked.

The company has not described the technical cause beyond the data inconsistency it found in testing. Nothing Workday has said points to a cyberattack.

Who was affected

It is not clear whether every Workday customer lost access. The company says 11,500 organizations around the world use its software for HR work, so a broad outage reaches a large number of workplaces at once.

Engadget lists Target, Walmart, Charles Schwab, Nasdaq and Netflix among Workday’s clients, along with public bodies such as the US Department of Energy and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Workday has not said which of these customers, if any, were hit by the Nov. 13 problem.

Engadget reported that user complaints on the tracking site Downdetector jumped at around 5:19 p.m. Eastern time and have tapered off since. Downdetector counts reports submitted by users, so its figures show when people noticed trouble, not how many accounts were actually affected.

What it means for employees

Because Workday handles time tracking, pay information and benefits in one place, an outage can leave a worker with no record of the hours they worked during the downtime and no way to see a pay stub or submit a leave request until access returns.

Workday has not published a workaround. The simple checks that apply to any service outage still hold: look for notices from your employer’s HR or IT team, and if the Workday app shows errors, signing out and back in once the company says the issue is fixed may clear them. Employers decide how missed clock-ins are handled, so questions about hours recorded during the outage go to the company’s HR department.

What Workday has said so far

Workday’s statements so far cover three points: it discovered the issue during testing, it put some systems into maintenance mode to address it, and it is looking for the best way to resolve the problem. The company apologized to customers for the disruption.

It has not given a time for full restoration or said whether any employee data was lost or changed because of the inconsistency it found.

Source: Engadget