Suddenly, lawmakers in many states were reminded that their state-run systems for administering unemployment benefits were sorely out of date and called for immediate modernization. But twenty-two states had already “modernized”—meaning they had moved from decades-old mainframe computers to the cloud—and they fared no better.9 Either the problem wasn’t the out-of-date tech or the modernization efforts had failed. The US Department of Labor is still trying to sort out today exactly what went wrong and what might be done to avoid these meltdowns in the future.
