Google Just Created an Online Unemployment Application with New York

Tech giant Google has teamed up with the state of New York for an online unemployment application system.

New York has seen job losses explode in recent weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Over 450,000 New Yorkers have tried to apply for unemployment benefits in the past three weeks and the activity has crashed the Department of Labor’s website and overloaded call center workers.

The site with Google is expected to be accessible Friday morning and is supported by Google’s cloud infrastructure. It should be able to handle a “high volume of uses,” allowing users to save incomplete applications and pick up where they left off. It can be reached via smartphones, tablets and laptops.

According to the company, it could eventually bring a similar system to other states also.

“Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the New York State Department of Labor’s unemployment insurance filing system has faced an unprecedented increase in volume — with peak weeks seeing a 16,000% increase in phone calls and a 1,600% increase in web traffic, compared to a typical week,” the New York Department of Labor said this week in a press release.

Google has also provided officials with websites for general coronavirus information, home-education and global social distancing data.

“We continue to work with local, state, and federal agencies on a number of projects to help them better serve citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic,” a representative from Google’s cloud division said in an email.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Alphabet Inc Class A (NASDAQ: GOOGL) and have not been compensated for this article.