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Unemployment website expected to reopen at 8 a.m. on Monday
Governor Ron DeSantis said the system was not built to handle so many applications. It was shut down over the weekend to process claims.
ORLANDO, Fla. - Governor Ron DeSantis answered questions about the state’s unemployment website in a news conference in Orlando Sunday.
“It’s very frustrating,” Zeljana Ondejl, who is unemployed, said. “It’s come to that point where I give up on trying and inputting anything and just pray that something comes.”
FOX 35 News first spoke with Ondelj earlier this month.
She lost her job as a hairstylist in March.
She filed for unemployment more than a month ago and has heard nothing.
“It just still says pending and I have not received any kind of confirmation that I was approved or not,” Ondelj said.
She’s among the thousands dealing with the constant issues with the state’s unemployment website.
The site is down once again for maintenance.
“I don’t think we’ve probably ever had an agency work as hard on a single problem in terms of man-hours that people are putting in,” Gov. DeSantis said during a news conference Sunday.
He went on to say: “As of Friday night, there has now been over 267,000 payments that have been sent out. So, that’s money in the bank.”
He said the system was not built to handle so many applications.
“Just to put that into context, we only had 300,000 [applications] all of last year,” DeSantis said. “So, this was a system that was not designed for this. We’ve done a lot of engineering work. Still doing more work on it to be able to do it… Look, this thing that was done. I mean, this was before I was governor, but I mean they spent $77 million on something that is really, really a flawed product.”
The unemployment website is set to reopen at 8 a.m. on Monday.