The coronavirus outbreak has forced businesses to close, with more than 300,000 residents putting in for unemployment benefits in recent weeks, eclipsing all previous records for claims.
And as claims surging more than 1,600 percent, bumps in the road are leaving thousands of residents being laid off — some filing for unemployment for the first time — angry, confused and frustrated. Phone lines are constantly jammed, 404 errors pop up when creating an account or the website is stuck buffering for people who are in dire need of income.
One of those hurdles, experts say, could be largely in part due to New Jersey’s dependence on an outdated, legacy programming language and crumbling infrastructure not equipped with contingency plans for a crisis of these proportions.
“Literally, we have systems that are 40 years-plus old, and there’ll be lots of postmortems. And one of them on our list will be, ‘How did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?’” Gov. Phil Murphy said during his daily press briefing Saturday.
The unemployment system runs on a legacy mainframe, using old programming language COBOL, or Common Business-Oriented Language, which was created in the 1950s in conjunction with the Department of Defense. COBOL is still used today by some financial companies, government agencies and ATMs, but most universities haven’t offered it in their curriculum since before Y2K.
But as the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it," said cybersecurity expert Joseph Steinberg, noting that up until a month ago, everything had been running fine for the last 40 years. Why make an extremely expensive and time-consuming change when unemployment was at record-low levels?
“That’s the problem with COBOL and a mainframe: they can be reliable for an extended period of time, but if something major changes, the reaction time to change it is going to be substantially more ... due to technology and human resource limitations,” Steinberg said.
State officials maintain there were no computer-related delays in processing claims, and pointed to the high volume of calls and low staffing issues.
“The system, although stressed, performed well. And the Labor IT staff performed even better to keep the system up, running, and adding capacity,” said Julie Garland Veffer, director of digital service at the state IT office. “We are always looking for ways to improve efficiency and modernize our systems.”
It’s unclear how often the main frame is maintained or how many engineers and tech workers are on staff. The state Department of Labor declined to comment further.
Now, it’s led to a call out for volunteers knowledgable in COBOL — similar to the state’s call out for nurses and medical professionals. An intake form on the state’s Covid-19 website is asking for those who know COBOL and have other tech skills.
“For all of you COBOL programmers in particular, now is your chance," Murphy said Wednesday when mentioning the volunteer website during his daily briefing.
Rutgers University computer science professor Ulrich Kremer said the requests for volunteers indicates experts are scarce. Coders proficient in COBOL are also probably older and retired folks, who doctors say are the most vulnerable to coronavirus. They may not have practiced in years, either.
“There’s no such thing as like, a brain surgeon as a hobby. This is complex stuff. And if you mess up in this, you have other problems — security, people’s information — it’s a big risk,” he said. “They may not have an option there."
Kremer compared maintaining a 40-year-old system to keeping up with an old car. It might work to take you to the grocery store a mile away, but once you have to drive 200 miles, the engine is overloaded and spare parts are hard to find.
“It worked, it did the job, but it’s an old car. Sometimes the only reasonable thing to do is throw it out and start from scratch,” Kremer said. But that’s not as easy as it sounds.
Upgrading isn’t like as going to the app store and hitting update or buying a new computer at BestBuy. An upgrade can’t be done until after the crisis slows down, and will be very expensive. For now, Steinberg predicts, the problems will be ongoing.
And during a global pandemic where hospitals are overloaded, there’s a shortage of PPE, and people are getting sicker by the minute, it’s the worst timing.
“(Murphy) is dealing with people in the state dying from a pandemic. If at this time he mentions we need COBOL, that means it was escalated to the governor. That illustrates how serious it is,” Steinberg said. “That’s the last thing he wants to be thinking about, is why the computers aren’t doing what they need to be doing."
The governor on Wednesday said he would welcome federal dollars for computer system upgrades if it is sent to New Jersey as part of the federal stimulus package. “We’ve got an overwhelming demand,” he said.
The unemployment site isn’t the only one running on old equipment, and New Jersey is far from the only state depending on these outdated systems.
Migrating a system can be risky in itself — especially one with so much vulnerable information — but something that should be analyzed, Steinberg said. And it should’ve also been analyzed a long time ago, before it was left to age, he said.
“It’s like how people get home alarm systems after they’ve been robbed,” he said. “At what point do we say, now it’s a big risk to have these technologies? And this incident highlights it.”
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