A major outage at human resources and payroll software giant Workday Inc. disrupted workplace operations across the country Friday night, leaving employees unable to clock in, check pay information, or request time off before services were restored Saturday morning.
The technical trouble began shortly after 5 p.m. EST on Friday, when outage-tracking website Downdetector recorded a spike of nearly 3,000 user reports.
Users attempting to log into the platform were met with an error message stating that Workday was experiencing a service interruption and advising them to contact their organization’s administrator or check back later.
In a statement Saturday, a Workday spokesperson confirmed that the disruption affected two of the company’s data centers and noted that service was fully restored by 11 a.m. EST on Saturday.
“Customers are coming back online,” the representative said. “We recognize the critical services we provide to our customers and their workforces, and we sincerely apologize for this outage.”
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the disruption stemmed from an issue discovered while Workday was testing its backup systems.
The glitch caused data inconsistencies, prompting the company to place some of its systems into maintenance mode to prevent errors when users attempted to access their accounts or complete administrative tasks.
While it remains unclear exactly how many clients were impacted, Workday serves more than 11,500 organizations worldwide. Its roster of major corporate clients includes retail giants Walmart Inc. and Target Inc., alongside Netflix Inc., Southwest Airlines, General Electric Co., Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, and Nasdaq.
The platform is also heavily utilized in the public sector by municipal governments in cities such as Seattle, Dallas, Philadelphia, Charlotte, and Denver, as well as federal entities including the U.S. Department of Energy and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The Workday disruption marked the second major enterprise software outage in as many days.
On Thursday, a global Microsoft 365 outage affected millions of users across Outlook, Teams, and Copilot. Microsoft Corp. executive Charles Lamanna confirmed on social media that the disruption was caused by technical challenges rather than a cybersecurity incident, with lingering connection issues extending into early Friday morning.
