IOWA, USA — The IowaWORKS.gov website that unemployed Iowans normally use to search for jobs and report reemployment activities has been down since June 26. Iowa Workforce Development said this is caused by a cyberattack on the third-party vendor that runs its workforce services.
Geographic Solutions Inc., the third-party vendor in question, is Florida-based and runs unemployment services for nearly two-dozen states. As of June 30, 17 states have unemployment services outages related to the GSI cyberattack.
GSI said there as no evidence the attackers accessed any sensitive information, and Iowa Workforce Development confirmed no Iowa users' information was affected.
It's been two and a half weeks since the website went down, but Jesse Dougherty, Iowa Workforce Development's spokesperson, said they still have no idea when the website will return.
"At present, there is no firm time table for restoring IowaWORKS.gov to public use, but we look forward to this situation being resolved soon," Dougherty wrote.
The state of Iowa is working with GSI to get IowaWORKS back up and running securely.
This outage hasn't delayed any unemployment benefits from reaching Iowans. However, Iowa Workforce Development's jobs bank, job searching tools and reporting system unemployed Iowans use to log job search activities required for them to continue receiving their unemployment benefits.
Iowa Workforce Development has temporary measures in place to circumvent these issues. It has temporarily suspended its requirement that Iowans report job search activities to receive unemployment.
Iowans are directed to use the National Labor Exchange website to search for jobs while IowaWORKS is down, or visit local IowaWORKS offices to meet with career planners.