Walmart was one of the 11,500 businesses that locked out their employees as HR platform Workday went down on Friday. The website Downdetector first reported nearly 3,000 outage reports for the platform shortly after 5 p.m. Friday. The disruption came just as Microsoft was struggling to restore its own services following a global outage affecting Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications.Workday, which provides cloud-based human resources and financial management software to more than 11,500 organisations worldwide, said some customers were experiencing a service disruption. The company temporarily placed production systems into maintenance mode after discovering a problem while testing its disaster-recovery environment.“We’re working urgently to investigate and resolve the issue,” a Workday spokesperson said, apologizing to affected customers.According to a technical notification shared by Washington University IT, Workday discovered that services in its disaster-recovery environment had unexpectedly connected to production databases during routine maintenance validation. This left some data in an inconsistent state, potentially causing errors when users attempted to access their accounts or execute jobs, integrations and other tasks.The company said it was investigating the best recovery path and planned to provide updates every 30 minutes.
Who was affected by the Workday outage ?
The disruption affected customers across multiple sectors, including universities and businesses. Washington University, Brown University, Emerson College, Georgia Tech and Saint Joseph’s University were among the institutions that reported Workday-related service problems.At Brown University, employees were advised that regular Workday functions, including time reporting, benefits enrolment, expense reports, hiring activities and leave management, were unavailable. Staff were asked to maintain separate records of their working hours so the information could be entered once the platform was restored.Workday is used by organisations for payroll processing, recruitment, employee benefits, attendance tracking, leave requests and other administrative functions. Its customers include major companies such as Walmart, Target and Nordstrom, although there was no confirmed indication that all or any of these retailers were affected by Friday’s incident.The company has not disclosed the total number of customers or employees affected by the disruption.
Walmart, Target, Chipotle
Corporate giants like Walmart, Target, General Electric, Morgan Stanley, Netflix and Southwest Airlines all use Workday. Municipal governments in cities like Seattle, Dallas and Philadelphia rely on it as well, alongside federal groups like NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Is Workday back up and running on Saturday morning?
As of November 14, 2026, Workday appears to be back online, although some users may still experience intermittent access problems.IsDown: Reports Workday operational, based on its November 14 check.Down For Everyone Or Just Me: Says it is no longer detecting a widespread outage. It recorded further disruptions on November 14, including a roughly one-hour incident.Engadget: Reported that Workday was still unavailable early Saturday, suggesting recovery was not immediate.