Chipotle Mexican Grill

Summary

A former employee filed a class action lawsuit against Chipotle Mexican Grill after cybercriminals accessed employee Workday payroll accounts in an October data breach, exposing unencrypted personal information including names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and banking account numbers. The plaintiff alleged the company breached its duties under common law, contract law, industry standards, and the Federal Trade Commission Act by failing to implement reasonable and adequate data security measures and by not providing timely notice of the breach. The complaint was filed in the US District Court for the Central District of California.

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Description

In October 2025, Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. experienced a data breach that exposed employee personal information maintained in Workday payroll accounts. According to allegations in a civil complaint filed by a former employee, cybercriminals were able to access the Workday payroll accounts of Chipotle workers and obtain unencrypted sensitive data. The exposed information included employee names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, and banking account numbers, all of which were reportedly stored without encryption. The breach is alleged to have occurred in October 2025, and a lawsuit stemming from the incident was initiated in the weeks that followed.

The consequences of the breach quickly moved from the technical sphere into the legal arena. On January 2, 2026, Christian Jasso, a former Chipotle employee, filed a class action complaint against the company in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. In the complaint, Jasso alleged that Chipotle breached duties owed to its employees under common law, contract law, industry standards, and the Federal Trade Commission Act by failing to implement reasonable and adequate data security measures and by failing to provide timely notice of the breach. The complaint specifically identified the Workday payroll system as the point of compromise and asserted that the personal information of employees was accessible to cybercriminals because it had not been encrypted. The lawsuit seeks to represent a broader class of employees whose data was similarly exposed during the October 2025 incident. Details regarding Chipotle's internal detection of the breach, its containment measures, its public disclosure timeline, and any remediation efforts are not described in the available reporting.

Sources

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