BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — The Louisiana Workforce Commission’s HiRE website is currently down after an attempted malware attack was discovered.
Forty other states and Washington D.C. — all of which use the company that operates the HiRE website, Geographic Solutions (GSI) — are impacted by the attack, according to LWC. However, the outage should not prevent eligible claimants from getting unemployment insurance benefits.
LWC said work is being done to get the website back up and running. In the meantime, the agency said it will be making sure that payments are issued once the website is live again for those who filed weekly certifications before the outage. The estimated restoration time is in the next 72 hours and payments will be delayed.
Additionally, the agency said, according to GSI, there wasn’t a data breach and HiRE users’ personal information was not compromised. The outage is impacting nearly 11,000 people in Louisiana.
The agency said weekly claims certifications for unemployment benefits can still be filed through the automated phone system (1-866-783-5567) by selecting “Option 2” to access your account and following the prompts. However, they warn that call center staff cannot file new claims or provide any claims-related information.