Vermont’s online portal for those seeking unemployment insurance benefits experienced technical difficulties again on Sunday and Monday, marking the latest in a recent series of disruptions to the system.
“We had issues with the processing of information back and forth between our systems that was causing issues for individuals trying to file their weekly claims — they were not able to,” said Cameron Wood, policy and legislative affairs director for the Department of Labor.
Wood said that it would be difficult to estimate how many Vermonters were impacted by the glitch, but that waiting times at the department’s call center — which often addresses concerns and processes claims when the portal is down — spiked to a high of around two hours on Monday.
According to Wood, the labor department learned of the problem early Monday morning and had fixed the portal by that same afternoon.
Vermonters have until Friday at 4 p.m. to file for their benefits for this week and there are no indications that Sunday and Monday’s glitch will prevent people from receiving their benefits for this week, Wood said.
Still, the hiccup represents the latest in a series of disruptions to the state’s unemployment insurance portal due to technical difficulties.
A recent system failure in December left Vermonters scrambling to file for unemployment benefits after the online claimant portal went down for several days. The system also buckled under the weight of increased claims during the Covid-19 pandemic, causing widespread delays for tens of thousands of Vermonters seeking benefits at the time.
Wood said the ongoing technical difficulties are a direct consequence of the age of the system, which is decades old.
“We’ve had mainframe problems going back many years — going back prior to the pandemic, during the pandemic, subsequent to the pandemic,” said Wood. “There are periods when our mainframe system is down entirely and we can’t operate our business processes and we can’t interact with the customers.”
A $30 million dollar IT project is currently underway to overhaul the current UI system, but it could take up to four years to complete, labor department officials have said.
Lawmakers have expressed worries that the ancient mainframe might not make it that long.
“I’m really concerned that if we have a four-year period in which we’re relying on this (current system) — that I don’t have an awful lot of confidence that this isn’t going to blow up,” Sen. Randy Brock R-Franklin said at a meeting of the Joint Information Technology Oversight Committee last month. Brock and his fellow committee members also requested that the Department of Labor develop contingency plans in case of just such a failure.
Wood told VTDigger that the issues the system has experienced in the past few months don’t necessarily represent a new or increasing threat of complete system failure, but that the department has nevertheless been operating with a sense of “elevated risk” in general.
“We are working to put in additional stabilizations of our systems so we can try to mitigate and make these instances as rare as we can,” Wood said. “I don’t think there would ever be a situation where we would say the heightened concern and the risks are gone.”
As far as contingency plans go, Wood said that the Department of Labor has also developed several strategies for dealing with a potential complete system failure.
“We would immediately have to transition to likely either getting a system from another state — which we have had conversations and we continued to have conversations about what that would look like — or we would immediately be transitioning to paper claims,” Wood said. “We have ongoing conversations about those contingency plans.”
