Michigan UIA website experiences performance issues over holiday weekend

Problem fixed, measures taken to make sure issues do not occur again

Michigan UIA website experiences performance issues over holiday weekend.

DETROIT – You might have experienced some issues while trying to sign into the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency's website. 

Local 4 received several calls and emails from people who said they were unable to access their unemployment benefits through the system. 

Recommended Videos



“We’re doing our best to make sure folks get their checks,” said Unemployment Insurance Agency spokesperson Chris DeWitt.

DeWitt said that’s their No. 1 goal, especially around the holidays, but recently that was hard to do. 

Over the last couple of days, people couldn’t access their unemployment benefits on the website due to some security updates.

“We experienced some performance issues that kind of slowed down some of the capabilities and there were some new users that were unable to create new accounts,” said Caleb Buhs, director of communications with the Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget. 

Buhs said they recently installed new technology to allow users to monitor their actions with state government and also added security features. That update caused some technology bugs with the website. 

“So it’s not as the system went down, in any way, but we experienced as if there are some folks who are trying to access the system as a new user who are unable to create an account,” Buhs said.

Workers quickly jumped into action to fix the problems and things are back up and running as normal, but they are taking extreme measures over the next couple of days to make sure this doesn’t happen again. 

“We certainly want to apologize for any inconvenience that people are running into," DeWitt said, "We know how frustrating this is."