As unemployment claims in Colorado tick back up again, the site where out-of-work Coloradans go to request benefits was down on Monday morning but was back up around 10 a.m.
Officials at the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment didn’t immediately know why myui.coworkforce.com wasn’t working but after being told, began investigating it, said Cher Haavind, the department’s deputy director.
Instead of seeing the log-in to their accounts, unemployed workers were greeted to the MyUI site with a “Renew Now” at the top of the page, along with links to related searches for Colorado unemployment benefits.
The issue, however, could be an expired domain address for coworkforce.com. According to Network Solutions, the company that the state registered the domain on, the coworkforce.com site expired Nov 28, 2020.
Jared Ewy, with Denver-based domain registrar Name.com, said it looked like the domain had expired. After running it by his team of engineers, they said, “shouldn’t have let that one expire.”
“It’s pretty standard that it would go down after expiring,” Ewy added.
An expired domain has caused issues for major companies in the past, including marketing firm Marketo back in 2017, which impacted customers all around the world.
But a bigger case was Google back in 2015. The search giant forgot to renew its main domain — Google.com — and a former employee snapped it up for $12. He gave it back to the company and Google paid him $6,006.13, which sort of spells out “Google,” and then doubled the amount after the former employee donated the sum to charity, The Verge reported.
This story is still being updated.
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