Walmart and Target Workers Locked Out of Pay and Benefits as Workday Outage Drags Into Saturday

Walmart and Target Workers Locked Out of Pay and Benefits as Workday Outage Drags Into Saturday

If you work at Walmart, Target, Chipotle or a thousand other big companies and you couldn’t clock in, check your pay or touch your benefits last night — it wasn’t you. It was Workday, and as of Saturday morning, it’s still not fixed.

The outage hit Friday evening, November 13. Downdetector logged a spike of nearly 3,000 problem reports starting around 5:19 PM Eastern, and workers across the country found the system they use for pay information, timekeeping, time-off requests and benefits enrollment either erroring out or gone completely.

Workday’s explanation, reported by the San Francisco Chronicle, is almost worse than a hack: nobody attacked anything. The company says a problem surfaced while it was testing its backup systems, and the test left some customer information in an “inconsistent state” — scrambled enough that it can throw errors when employees open their accounts or try to complete basic tasks. Workday responded by placing affected systems into maintenance mode while it figures out the safest way to restore them, and promised status updates every 30 minutes.

Here’s the distinction the viral posts are blurring: Workday serves more than 11,500 organizations worldwide — Walmart, Target, Chipotle, Skechers, Netflix, Charles Schwab, Nasdaq, Southwest Airlines and even NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are all on the client list. That is the company’s total customer count, not a confirmed list of who got knocked offline. Workday itself has only said “some of our customers” were affected, and it has not named names or offered a time when everything will be back.

The timing made it feel apocalyptic. The Workday failure landed in the middle of a separate Microsoft 365 outage that started November 12 and hammered Outlook and Teams around the world, and on the same Friday the FAA ordered a nationwide ground stop over air traffic control communication problems. Three different systems, three different causes, no connection established between any of them — just a very bad 48 hours for the infrastructure everybody assumes will always be on.

For workers, though, the abstraction doesn’t matter. Open enrollment deadlines are landing right now, shifts need clocking, and paychecks are the one thing that cannot be “inconsistent.” Some institutions have already started moving deadlines — Emerson College extended its open enrollment to Monday because of the outage. Until Workday announces a full restoration, millions of employees are stuck refreshing a maintenance page and taking their employer’s word for it.

ITSBIZKIT will update this story when Workday confirms service is fully restored.

Sources: Engadget and the San Francisco Chronicle’s reporting on the outage; Workday statements quoted in that coverage; Downdetector report data; the outage was flagged on X by Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh).