Google bolsters New York’s overburdened unemployment website

It hasn’t been easy for newly unemployed New Yorkers to apply for benefits in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, so Google tried to make the website better.

The New York state government announced a partnership with a handful of tech companies in a press release on Thursday. Most notably, Google Cloud infrastructure has been used to improve and reinforce the state’s online unemployment benefits application page. It had to go offline for a couple hours on Thursday evening, but should now theoretically be able to handle a higher load than before.

Performance wasn’t the only thing that got enhanced. The unemployment website also got the ability to save incomplete applications, in case a user needs to step away and come back later. It should also work better on a variety of devices like smartphones and tablets. Finally, the press release promised a streamlined experience with fewer questions to answer.

To say New York’s previous unemployment infrastructure wasn’t up to the task would be a massive understatement. Hundreds of thousands of freshly let go New Yorkers have tried to apply for unemployment in the past few weeks, but many applicants experienced system crashes that left them empty-handed. 

Though the Empire State has been by far the hardest hit by the pandemic, the entire country has seen a surge of unemployment claims that have put enormous pressure on the systems in place to handle them. There were 6.6 million unemployment claims filed nationwide last week alone. 

Google isn’t the only company partnering with New York in this endeavor. Deloitte is opening a large-scale call center, while Verizon is helping increase the Department of Labor call center’s capacity. Of course, Google also launched a dedicated coronavirus help site in late March, though it didn’t exactly do what the president said it would do.