Workday Outage: Backup Test Snarls Payroll and HR for 11,500 Organizations, Service Restored Saturday
Workday, the enterprise software company whose platform handles payroll and human resources for thousands of employers, suffered a major outage on Friday, November 13, leaving some customers' employees unable to log in to clock in, check pay or request time off. A company spokesperson said the disruption affected two data centers, was not related to a cybersecurity incident, and that service was restored by 11 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday, November 14.
Headquartered in Pleasanton, California, Workday provides finance and human-resources cloud services to more than 11,500 organizations, including Walmart, Target, Netflix, Salesforce, PNC Bank, Chipotle and Southwest Airlines, as well as the city governments of Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Charlotte and Denver, federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Energy, and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Downdetector, a website that tracks outages, recorded nearly 3,000 Workday problem reports within a short span on Friday afternoon, and some employees still could not sign in on Saturday morning.
In a status update, Workday said that while validating its weekly maintenance window for disaster-recovery tenants, it found that tenanted services at the disaster-recovery site had unexpectedly connected to production databases, leaving data in an inconsistent state that could cause access errors or failed tasks. The company placed all WD1 production tenants into maintenance mode and said it would provide updates every 30 minutes. "Some of our customers are experiencing a service disruption and we're working urgently to investigate and resolve the issue," a spokesperson said, apologizing for the inconvenience.
The outage was the second major business-software disruption this week, after Microsoft 365 suffered a global failure earlier in the week that took Outlook, Teams and other services offline for days. Workday did not say exactly how many customers were affected or whether any payroll data was damaged. (Source: Workday)
Source: Workday
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图片来源：Wikimedia Commons，Workday 位于加州 Pleasanton 的总部大楼（Coolcaesar 摄），CC BY-SA 4.0 | Image: Wikimedia Commons, Workday headquarters in Pleasanton, California (photo by Coolcaesar), CC BY-SA 4.0
