Jobless Floridians Still Waiting For Benefits

From the Florida Phoenix: By Diane Rado - April 17, 2020

Thousands of jobless Floridians are still trying to get their state unemployment benefits — even after struggling through the nightmare application process.

After overnight maintenance, the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity’s jobless portal at Floridajobs.org remained offline at 9:30 a.m. Wednesday for those who wanted to request payment of benefits.

Jobless Floridians can visit that site and logon to the state’s CONNECT portal to apply for jobless benefits or to request payment of benefits.

Users on Tuesday night received a prompt that said the site would be down from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Yet mid-morning on Wednesday, jobless Floridians who had already applied for benefits but looked to request payment received a prompt that said: “In order to improve our ability to process current applications quicker, CONNECT will be unavailable for necessary maintenance. We apologize for this inconvenience. If you are a new claimant, visit http:///www.floridajobs.org/RAApplication.”

Florida’s process requires that unemployed workers apply for benefits, wait for approval, then request payment of those benefits. They must continue to request payment every two weeks thereafter.

Florida officials have acknowledged that the rush of coronavirus-inspired layoffs has overwhelmed the state’s online portal and phone centers. To ease the bottleneck, officials have said they would add servers and hire call-center workers.

Yet on Tuesday, the phone system directed callers to the website, where users continued to experience loops, timeouts and efforts to log back on.

This story was originally published by the Florida Phoenix. For more stories from the Florida Phoenix, visit FloridaPhoenix.com.