Walmart outage today: After Microsoft disruption, payroll, HR services affected in 11,500 businesses as Workday goes down

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.