Hot weather has made it more than just tough to go outside.
It apparently caused an intermittent outage the past few days with the Connecticut Department of Labor computers that handle unemployment benefits.
The outage impacting computers that process Connecticut unemployment benefits was serious enough that it led to the abrupt postponement of a legislative hearing where up to 14 employees of the Connecticut Department of Labor were supposed to attend, including the commissioner, two deputy commissioners, and other high-ranking staff.
The outage became an issue around 5 p.m. Sunday. Members of a Facebook unemployment page with thousands of members in Connecticut posted about it, according to one of its moderators.
The DOL said heat-related issues caused failures with its power units, air conditioning, and servers. Those servers were back up within a few hours Sunday, but then failed again for about five hours to start off the week.
By midday Monday, the DOL had its system back up and running. It says no data was lost, and while hundreds may not have been able to make their weekly claims, the agency says they have until Friday to do so. Still, the outage created delays that will impact some more than others.
“These people living paycheck to paycheck can’t file, for a couple of days, that means their payment’s gonna come two days later”, said Gina, the moderator from a Connecticut unemployment page on Facebook who did not want to share her last name.
Despite this rough start to the week, Gina gave the DOL credit for dramatic reductions in the amount of time it takes to process an unemployment claim during the pandemic.
