Another Day, Another Outage: HR Platform Workday Suffers Massive Failure Impacting Millions of Workers

Workday, a widely-used business software platform that manages payroll and human resources for thousands of major corporations, experienced a significant service disruption on Friday, blocking millions of working Americans from clocking in or out, accessing payroll information, and performing other vital functions. The outage follows closely on the heels of Microsoft’s massive email outage that impacted the entire world’s ability to communicate.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the Workday outage impacts approximately 11,500 companies that rely on its platform for critical business operations including payroll processing and human resources management. Users attempting to access the service were greeted with an error message stating the platform was unavailable due to a service interruption at around 5:00 p.m. ET on Friday, meaning many companies suffered disruptions of their typical end of the week operations.

Among the affected clients are major retail corporations including Walmart and Target, along with other corporate giants such as Netflix, Salesforce, PNC Bank, Chipotle, Southwest Airlines, General Electric, and Nasdaq. The disruption also impacted numerous government entities, including the cities of Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Charlotte, and Denver, as well as federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The outage was first detected by Downdetector, a website that monitors digital service disruptions, which reported nearly 3,000 Workday-related issues shortly after 5:00 p.m. on Friday. The platform displayed a message to users acknowledging the service interruption and apologizing for the inconvenience, directing customers to contact their organization’s Workday Administrator for additional assistance.

The Downdetector report tracker shows a spike in reports of Workday trouble on Friday followed by lower levels heading into the weekend — but that isn’t a sign that the system was fixed. Workday is naturally accessed less on the weekend due to the nature of its software offerings.

A Workday spokesperson addressed the situation in a statement, saying, “Some of our customers are experiencing a service disruption and we’re working urgently to investigate and resolve the issue. We sincerely apologize for the challenges this is causing impacted customers.” However, the company has not provided an estimated timeline for when full services will be restored.

According to initial reports, the disruption occurred after Workday discovered a problem during routine testing of backup systems. This revelation raises questions about the company’s disaster recovery procedures and the vulnerabilities that can emerge even during maintenance operations.

This isn’t the first major outage in the tech world this week. Breitbart News reported Thursday and Friday on a massive email outage caused by Microsoft Outlook that shut down the email systems of companies, governments, and individuals around the world:

Microsoft said the disruption stemmed from server problems and that it had seen no signs of a cyberattack. By Friday, the company reported “signs of stabilization” after rolling out fixes more broadly. By then the outage had already rippled through trading firms, airlines, shipping companies and government offices on multiple continents. Government agencies in Australia, Japan and the United States were among those affected. Australia’s spy agency and federal police were caught up in the outage, and the U.S. House of Representatives said its users had been hit, with engineers working alongside Microsoft to resolve the problem. Tony Burke, Australia’s Cyber Security Minister, described the scope of the damage: “The impact that they are dealing with … is very much on email systems.” That email disruption, tied to Microsoft’s Exchange Online messaging platform, which handles email, calendar, contacts and tasks, became the common thread across industries. Microsoft said in a service health notice that 365 features dependent on Exchange Online and email had gone down, while features that didn’t rely on it kept working.

Read more at the San Francisco Chronicle here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.