A view of Workday headquarters on February 06, 2025 in Pleasanton, California. A spokesperson confirmed that the human resources software company was experiencing an outage Friday night. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
An outage in the human resources platform Workday is locking out employees across some 11,500 businesses from their employer accounts.
What we know:
The website Downdetector first reported nearly 3,000 outage reports for the platform shortly after 5 p.m. Friday.
Employees use Workday for human resources functions like clocking in and out, requesting time off, training, and benefits. Some companies use it as a gateway to their benefits enrollment, so employees hoping to take advantage of open enrollment weren’t able to do so Friday night during the outage.
Employees who tried to access Workday Friday were met with an error message stating the site was unavailable. (Photo: LiveNOW from FOX)
What they're saying:
"Some of our customers are experiencing a service disruption and we’re working urgently to investigate and resolve the issue," a spokesperson for Workday said in a statement to LiveNOW from FOX. "We sincerely apologize for the challenges this is causing impacted customers."
The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the company discovered a problem while testing backup systems, leading to the disruption.
By the numbers:
The company’s website says more than 11,500 companies use the platform for their employees. The companies it lists as clients are a who’s who of well-known names, including Target, Walmart, Morgan Stanley, PNC Bank, Prudential, Charles Schwab, Nasdaq, Chipotle, Cinemark, Southwest Airlines, Blackbaud, Hubspot, Salesforce, General Electric and Netflix.
Some municipal governments like the cities of Philadelphia, Dallas, Charlotte, Seattle and Denver and some federal agencies like the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology are also listed as clients.
What we don't know:
Workday has not provided an estimate of when the platform will be running again.
The Source: Information for this story came from Workday, Downdetector and the San Francisco Chronicle. This story was reported from Orlando.