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State Unemployment Website Down For Weekend

Photo: Free To Use Sounds
Photo: Free To Use Sounds

Rushing to reduce a massive backlog of claims created as businesses shuttered due to the coronavirus, Florida’s unemployment agency announced Friday that it has now processed more than 31 percent of unemployment claims, with payments of up of 275 dollars a week going out to 22 percent of the applicants.
However, residents continue to express frustrations about being cut off from the state’s online CONNECT unemployment system and not being able to get through to call centers for assistance. The Department of Economic Opportunity also took the CONNECT system offline Friday, and it will remain unavailable to Floridians until Monday morning. Department of Management Services Secretary Jonathan Satter, who was put in in charge of the system last week, says the agency will be working all weekend to process applications that have already been filed, adding staff can do that more quickly when the website is down. “We needed all the processing power we could get, to process payments. We have a number of large batch jobs that were ready. Rather than place a lot of drain on the system today and over the weekend, we said ‘let’s take it down’. Let’s process as many payments as we can.” With the main site down, the state has made a second system available for people to apply and DEO is still accepting paper applications. However, claimants will not be able to check for updates to their status this weekend. The state has now processed nearly 220 thousand claims, out of 700 thousand unique submissions. In total, about 154 thousand claimants have been paid nearly 160 million dollars.