Outage at HR platform Workday locks millions of employees out of their account

The company placed its system in maintenance mode after discovering an issue.

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A widespread Workday outage on the evening of November 13 left employees unable to clock in and out, access their pay info, request for time off or file for benefits. According to San Francisco Chronicle, the human resources platform said it placed some of its systems into maintenance mode to fix an issue it discovered during testing. Specifically, the problem left some information inconsistent, and the company said it could cause errors when users try to access their accounts or complete tasks within its system. There was a spike in reports at Downdetector at around 5:19PM Eastern time, though it has tapered off since then. 

It's not quite clear if the outage affected all of Workday's customers. But the company said 11,500 organizations around the world use it for various HR tasks. Its clients include Target, Walmart, Charles Schwab, Nasdaq, Netflix and even the US Department of Energy and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The company has apologized for the disruption and said that it's looking for the best way to fix the problem.