California’s highly touted website that helps people find jobs and businesses fill openings has been out of service all week — and is expected to remain down until after the July 4 holiday.
People trying to use the CalJOBS site, which also provides advice for writing resumes and finding training programs, get a notice saying, “This site can’t be reached.”
Outages of other state job sites have been reported around the country. The state Employment Development Department (EDD) said Wednesday that it was notifying customers that Geographic Solutions Inc. (GSI), the site’s vendor, is experiencing a nationwide outage. “GSI’s outage sent the CalJOBS website offline,” an EDD statement Wednesday said. GSI has not responded to a request for comment.
EDD said GSI has notified states that it was “investigating the outage and working 24 hours a day to bring its systems back online as soon as possible. GSI will provide additional information as soon as possible. California and dozens of other states were impacted.”
A “Major Notification” from EDD, sent to interested parties and obtained by the Sacramento Bee, shows that at 9 a.m. Monday, it posted: “The CalJOBS page is not accessible. The vendor is working towards a resolution, but expects it to be unavailable most of the day.” Among those the notification was addressed to was the California Workforce Development Board, which describes itself as the “governor’s agent for the development, oversight and continuous improvement of California’s workforce development system.”
EDD provided updates throughout the week, and on Wednesday, sent out a new notification, writing, “There is no change in status as the vendor works to restore services, which is not expected until after the July 4 holiday. Updates will be provided if there are changes to this time frame.” Under a box titled “estimated time of recovery” is the word “unknown,” and under “next update,” the memo says 4 p.m. Tuesday, July 5.
Assemblyman Jim Patterson, R-Fresno, saw the outage as another example of EDD inefficiency. Patterson has been active in trying to improve EDD services.
“EDD continues to fail people,” he said. “Imagine if Amazon couldn’t serve its customers for days at a time. It wouldn’t be acceptable to them. This isn’t acceptable to Californians, and it’s not acceptable to me.”
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