'Catastrophic' Storage Failure Slows Oregon Jobless Checks

A "catastrophic failure" in the state of Oregon's government data center has delayed unemployment payments to residents, the state said Tuesday. The outage began Monday night during scheduled maintenance, but kept state systems offline until midday Tuesday. The delay caused backups in the Oregon Employment Department's processing of unemployment insurance payments and claims, state officials said. Checks usually are processed Monday night, the department said.

Technicians from a state contractor were expanding storage Monday night when something went wrong, according to Matt Shelby, a spokesman for the Department of Administrative Services, which administers the State Data Center. Shelby told The Columbian that the problem left state agencies unable to connect to databases or run batch computing processes that typically run overnight. Shelby said operations returned to normal Tuesday morning.

A "catastrophic failure" typically refers to a total failure of a system, which leaves little or no option for recovery. The description of the Oregon outage suggests a hardware failure for a storage unit.

State officials said the unemployment data was intact, and they expected to try and resume the payment processing on Tuesday evening.