Workday outage leaves millions of employees locked out of accounts
A widespread outage at US HR platform Workday on the evening of November 13 blocked employees from accessing their accounts and tasks. The company put some systems into maintenance mode and says it is seeking the best way to fix the problem.
A widespread outage hit Workday, a US provider of cloud-based human resources software, on the evening of November 13. Employees were unable to clock in and out, view their pay information, request time off or file for benefits. The platform is used for HR tasks by organizations around the world, so the disruption reached a large number of users.
What happened
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the company moved some of its systems into maintenance mode after finding a problem during testing. The issue left some data inconsistent, and Workday warned that it could cause errors when users try to access their accounts or complete tasks in the system.
Reports on the outage-tracking site Downdetector spiked at about 5:19 PM Eastern time, but have since tapered off.
How far it reached
It is not entirely clear whether every Workday customer was affected. The company has said 11,500 organizations worldwide use its services. Its clients include retailers Target and Walmart, financial firm Charles Schwab, exchange operator Nasdaq, streaming company Netflix, the US Department of Energy and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Workday has apologized for the disruption and said it is looking for the best way to resolve the problem.
