The State of Maryland’s BEACON unemployment-insurance portal was taken offline Sunday for what the Maryland Department of Labor called technical issues. The site was not accessible until the early evening.
The site was designed to help residents, including gig workers, apply for expanded unemployment benefits that have been provided in response to the coronavirus-driven economic crisis in Maryland. It was overwhelmed within minutes of its launch at 7 a.m. Friday. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan said that afternoon, “I’m sorry people had difficulties with that. It is now fixed.”
The labor department said shortly after noon on Sunday that they had “a team of professionals working hard” to address the problem, but that the site needed to be taken down for maintenance.
We are currently experiencing technical issues with the online BEACON application and have a team of professionals working hard to quickly resolve them. In order to perform this necessary maintenance, our vendor must take the application down for a period of time.
— MD Department of Labor (@MD_Labor) April 26, 2020
Tim Smith, of Germantown, Maryland, said his wife had a frustrating experience while trying to file for unemployment Sunday.
“It just kept going around in circles and circles … and ultimately crashed,” Smith said. “She ended up spending probably 45 minutes to a good hour trying to re-log in and go through the process four or five times.”
The site remained down for a large portion of the day. Around 7 p.m. Sunday, the Maryland Department of Labor tweeted that the site was back online, but was working slowly.
Update as of 7:00 pm: After taking the application down for maintenance this afternoon, the BEACON One-Stop application is back online, but is operating at slower speeds. Unfortunately, our vendor cannot guarantee that additional technical difficulties will not arise.
— MD Department of Labor (@MD_Labor) April 26, 2020
WTOP’s Neal Augenstein and Dick Uliano contributed to this report.
