Workday, a critical business software provider for human resources and payroll, experienced a significant service outage on Friday, impacting approximately 11,500 client companies. The disruption left employees of major corporations, including Walmart, Target, Netflix, Salesforce, and Southwest Airlines, unable to access essential systems. Several government agencies, such as the cities of Philadelphia, Dallas, and Seattle, as well as the US Department of Energy, were also affected.
Downdetector, a website that monitors digital outages, registered a surge of nearly 3,000 reported issues with Workday shortly after 5 p.m. on Friday. A Workday spokesperson acknowledged the disruption in a statement, saying, "We are experiencing a service interruption. Your service will be restored as quickly as possible. We sincerely apologize for the challenges this is causing impacted customers."
The company informed the San Francisco Chronicle that the outage occurred after a problem was identified during testing of its backup systems. Workday has not yet provided an estimate for when services will be fully restored.
This incident follows a major global outage experienced by Microsoft earlier in the week, which crippled its widely used Outlook and Teams platforms, affecting businesses and governments worldwide.