THE CRUNCH
A widespread outage at HR platform Workday on the evening of 13 November left employees unable to clock in and out, view their pay information, request time off or file for benefits. The company placed some of its systems into maintenance mode after discovering an issue during testing, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The problem left some information inconsistent, which Workday said could cause errors when users tried to access their accounts or complete tasks.
Reports spiked on Downdetector at around 5:19PM Eastern time, though they tapered off afterwards. It is not clear whether the outage affected all of Workday's customers, but the platform's reach is considerable: the company says 11,500 organisations worldwide use it for HR tasks, including Target, Walmart, Charles Schwab, Nasdaq, Netflix, the US Department of Energy and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Workday has apologised for the disruption and said it is looking for the best way to fix the problem.