It's Thursday, April six. I'm Oscar Ramires from the Daily Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is your daily coronavirus update. A seventeen million Americans file claims for unemployment. Many are having problems completing the process online. For some states, the problem is rooted in crashing websites due to a decades old coding language known as cobal that almost no one knows. McKenna Kelly, policy reporter at The Verge, joins us for why some unemployment checks are being held up.
Thanks for joining us, McKenna, Hey, glad to be here. We're gonna continue talking about coronavirus and its effects on the country. One of the interesting things that's happening is that when the country gets stressed like this, overwhelmed in a sense, you can say, you see a lot of the inadequacies with the healthcare side of things, hospitals, the lack of ppe personal protective equipment and ventilators, those cracks start to be exposed on the economic front and the
way states are operating. An interesting thing is happening right now. We have about seventeen million Americans that have filed for unemployment, and there's a handful of states that have such outdated systems there where people are just spending hours on the websites trying to get through. In many cases they can't
get through. And a lot of it has to do with this decades old coding language known as Cobal that some of these states are using, and it's just causing a mess for them and for the people that are trying to file for unemployment. McKenna tell us a little bit about this coding language, Cobal and how the states are using it and what's happening. So Cobal is nearly sixty years old. It was developed in the nineteen fifties because a lot of computer manufacturers were creating their own
programming languages. So if government or the private sector wanted to use a variety of different manufacturers in different computing systems, it was difficult to manage basic tasks with so many different languages. So in the fifties, the Defense Department worked to create Cobal, and since it was one of the first standardized languages, it grew exponential over the next couple of years, becoming the most widely used language by the nineties seventies. So we've seen a lack of investment in
updating these systems that are forty fifty years old. The first time I heard about this was last month or whatnot, when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy had made a plea
for more programmers that knew how to use Kobal. And it was just like you know that you hear this story of like, oh, well, it hasn't been using for years, nobody knows how to use it anymore, basically, But I didn't really understand the effect that this would have overall until this recent influx of people trying to file for unemployment and we're hearing that there might be a second round of layoffs that are here now are coming very soon. So what does this look like in practicality when people
are logging onto the website? Is it just crashing because these systems are so outdated? What's going on? So I tried to talk to as many people as possible about the errors that they were experiencing. The one that I focused on the most, and one of the stories that I wrote this week with a man in Colorado who it took him three days of trying to submit his information.
He would go into the system, file out everything that the government asked for him, it took him about thirty minutes the first time, and clicks submit, and it would say that the system was overloaded, and every twenty four hours in the Colorado system, it asked you to re enter that information over again. So he could just be sitting there clicking submit, submit, submit, for twenty four hours and then have to fill out all over again. And he did that for three days. I think anybody can
sympathize with that. Such a tedious and frustrating thing when you get to the very end and then it doesn't work. So the big question here, who's using this system? You guys said maybe there was about twelve states that are using this what states might be experiencing some of these problems? So last week I reached out to every state labor department in the country, and from what I heard back, at least thirteen used the language. Now, COBAL is being
used in a variety of different capacities. So in one state, I can't remember exactly what it is, but COBAL is paired with Java as they're trying to upgrade the system, so it's functioning in different forms and a variety of different states. But it is a widespread issue that is impacting people all across the country. Also from your reporting, you said that, according to Reuters, of banking systems are built on COBL, A t M swipes still rely on
this language. But they all have kind of dedicated people and they've been working on these things for a long time now. And the Government Accountability Office has issued a bunch of different reports basically saying guys, we need to get this in order, we need to update these things. And these older systems are costing taxpayers around three dred and thirty seven million dollars a year, and most of it is just towards maintenance. That's one of the biggest issues.
And as I was reporting the story, one of the largest problems is that a large majority of the people who know COBL are growing and meeting retirement age. There just aren't enough people who are fluent in the language that can come back to the workforce and help maintain these systems and times of crisis. During Y two K, we experienced a similar issue when people were terrified that computer systems would rupture when they switched to the new millennium.
So we had hordes of COBAL programmers come back. And so now we're twenty years down the line since and more of those people have grown even older. And when COBAL programmers were on the job in the fifties, sixties,
and seventies, code and computer engineering wasn't in academia. People didn't learn how to formalize it and communicate what they were doing, and a lot of them there wasn't open source networks for people to even grab basic code to incorporate in the system, so it made it harder for newcomers who looked to come back and help out to even look at the code and really figure out what's going on there. Wow. I mean, it just seems like
such a tough thing again to handle on. I guess IBM is offering free COBAL training for some programmers across the country, but even then, how many people can you get up to speed when the need is so immediate with these unemployment benefits that people need to sign up for. It's pretty crazy. So just another thing, like I said, it just this whole stress test on the country just exposes these cracks, and it's just another thing that we
now we know we need to update. We need to either get out of these systems, move over to other systems, or something. I mean, it just needs to be modernized overall. People have been sounding the alarm for modernization for years, but it takes a crisis. Unfortunately, we've seen this time and time again in other parts of the government. It takes a crisis for lawmakers to react and fix things.
So maybe in the next couple of months we'll see some additional money handed to states to update these systems. Mchannic Kelly, policy reporter at The Verge, Thank you very much for joining us. Hey, thanks glad to be here. I'm Oscar Romeiraz and this has been your daily coronavirus update. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday through Friday. So follow us on I Heard Radio or wherever you get your podcasts.