PepsiCo is being sued in three states by workers charging that they were shorted on wages following a cyberattack against a payroll service used by the company.
The situation came about because of a ransomware attack on Kronos, one of the world’s biggest third-party payroll and human-resources services. The attack last December shut off access for several weeks to Kronos Private Cloud, used by thousands of employers to manage their payrolls.
In the wake of the attack, half a dozen lawsuits were filed against different companies that use Kronos, charging them with pay violations. PepsiCo has been sued in New York, New Jersey and Virginia. The New York suit claims that when the Kronos service went down, PepsiCo had no backup plan to manage payroll and started issuing paychecks with “estimated weekly pay” that did not reflect actual hours worked.
The suits are asking for class-action status, back pay and damages.
