Speaker 1: It's Thursday, April six. I'm Oscar Ramires from the Daily
Speaker 1: Dive podcast in Los Angeles, and this is your daily
Speaker 1: coronavirus update. A seventeen million Americans file claims for unemployment.
Speaker 1: Many are having problems completing the process online. For some states,
Speaker 1: the problem is rooted in crashing websites due to a
Speaker 1: decades old coding language known as cobal that almost no
Speaker 1: one knows. McKenna Kelly, policy reporter at The Verge, joins
Speaker 1: us for why some unemployment checks are being held up.
Speaker 1: Thanks for joining us, McKenna, Hey, glad to be here.
Speaker 1: We're gonna continue talking about coronavirus and its effects on
Speaker 1: the country. One of the interesting things that's happening is
Speaker 1: that when the country gets stressed like this, overwhelmed in
Speaker 1: a sense, you can say, you see a lot of
Speaker 1: the inadequacies with the healthcare side of things, hospitals, the
Speaker 1: lack of ppe personal protective equipment and ventilators, those cracks
Speaker 1: start to be exposed on the economic front and the
Speaker 1: way states are operating. An interesting thing is happening right now.
Speaker 1: We have about seventeen million Americans that have filed for unemployment,
Speaker 1: and there's a handful of states that have such outdated
Speaker 1: systems there where people are just spending hours on the
Speaker 1: websites trying to get through. In many cases they can't
Speaker 1: get through. And a lot of it has to do
Speaker 1: with this decades old coding language known as Cobal that
Speaker 1: some of these states are using, and it's just causing
Speaker 1: a mess for them and for the people that are
Speaker 1: trying to file for unemployment. McKenna tell us a little
Speaker 1: bit about this coding language, Cobal and how the states
Speaker 1: are using it and what's happening. So Cobal is nearly
Speaker 1: sixty years old. It was developed in the nineteen fifties
Speaker 1: because a lot of computer manufacturers were creating their own
Speaker 1: programming languages. So if government or the private sector wanted
Speaker 1: to use a variety of different manufacturers in different computing systems,
Speaker 1: it was difficult to manage basic tasks with so many
Speaker 1: different languages. So in the fifties, the Defense Department worked
Speaker 1: to create Cobal, and since it was one of the
Speaker 1: first standardized languages, it grew exponential over the next couple
Speaker 1: of years, becoming the most widely used language by the
Speaker 1: nineties seventies. So we've seen a lack of investment in
Speaker 1: updating these systems that are forty fifty years old. The
Speaker 1: first time I heard about this was last month or whatnot,
Speaker 1: when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy had made a plea
Speaker 1: for more programmers that knew how to use Kobal. And
Speaker 1: it was just like you know that you hear this
Speaker 1: story of like, oh, well, it hasn't been using for years,
Speaker 1: nobody knows how to use it anymore, basically, But I
Speaker 1: didn't really understand the effect that this would have overall
Speaker 1: until this recent influx of people trying to file for
Speaker 1: unemployment and we're hearing that there might be a second
Speaker 1: round of layoffs that are here now are coming very soon.
Speaker 1: So what does this look like in practicality when people
Speaker 1: are logging onto the website? Is it just crashing because
Speaker 1: these systems are so outdated? What's going on? So I
Speaker 1: tried to talk to as many people as possible about
Speaker 1: the errors that they were experiencing. The one that I
Speaker 1: focused on the most, and one of the stories that
Speaker 1: I wrote this week with a man in Colorado who
Speaker 1: it took him three days of trying to submit his information.
Speaker 1: He would go into the system, file out everything that
Speaker 1: the government asked for him, it took him about thirty
Speaker 1: minutes the first time, and clicks submit, and it would
Speaker 1: say that the system was overloaded, and every twenty four
Speaker 1: hours in the Colorado system, it asked you to re
Speaker 1: enter that information over again. So he could just be
Speaker 1: sitting there clicking submit, submit, submit, for twenty four hours
Speaker 1: and then have to fill out all over again. And
Speaker 1: he did that for three days. I think anybody can
Speaker 1: sympathize with that. Such a tedious and frustrating thing when
Speaker 1: you get to the very end and then it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: So the big question here, who's using this system? You
Speaker 1: guys said maybe there was about twelve states that are
Speaker 1: using this what states might be experiencing some of these problems?
Speaker 1: So last week I reached out to every state labor
Speaker 1: department in the country, and from what I heard back,
Speaker 1: at least thirteen used the language. Now, COBAL is being
Speaker 1: used in a variety of different capacities. So in one state,
Speaker 1: I can't remember exactly what it is, but COBAL is
Speaker 1: paired with Java as they're trying to upgrade the system,
Speaker 1: so it's functioning in different forms and a variety of
Speaker 1: different states. But it is a widespread issue that is
Speaker 1: impacting people all across the country. Also from your reporting,
Speaker 1: you said that, according to Reuters, of banking systems are
Speaker 1: built on COBL, A t M swipes still rely on
Speaker 1: this language. But they all have kind of dedicated people
Speaker 1: and they've been working on these things for a long
Speaker 1: time now. And the Government Accountability Office has issued a
Speaker 1: bunch of different reports basically saying guys, we need to
Speaker 1: get this in order, we need to update these things.
Speaker 1: And these older systems are costing taxpayers around three dred
Speaker 1: and thirty seven million dollars a year, and most of
Speaker 1: it is just towards maintenance. That's one of the biggest issues.
Speaker 1: And as I was reporting the story, one of the
Speaker 1: largest problems is that a large majority of the people
Speaker 1: who know COBL are growing and meeting retirement age. There
Speaker 1: just aren't enough people who are fluent in the language
Speaker 1: that can come back to the workforce and help maintain
Speaker 1: these systems and times of crisis. During Y two K,
Speaker 1: we experienced a similar issue when people were terrified that
Speaker 1: computer systems would rupture when they switched to the new millennium.
Speaker 1: So we had hordes of COBAL programmers come back. And
Speaker 1: so now we're twenty years down the line since and
Speaker 1: more of those people have grown even older. And when
Speaker 1: COBAL programmers were on the job in the fifties, sixties,
Speaker 1: and seventies, code and computer engineering wasn't in academia. People
Speaker 1: didn't learn how to formalize it and communicate what they
Speaker 1: were doing, and a lot of them there wasn't open
Speaker 1: source networks for people to even grab basic code to
Speaker 1: incorporate in the system, so it made it harder for
Speaker 1: newcomers who looked to come back and help out to
Speaker 1: even look at the code and really figure out what's
Speaker 1: going on there. Wow. I mean, it just seems like
Speaker 1: such a tough thing again to handle on. I guess
Speaker 1: IBM is offering free COBAL training for some programmers across
Speaker 1: the country, but even then, how many people can you
Speaker 1: get up to speed when the need is so immediate
Speaker 1: with these unemployment benefits that people need to sign up for.
Speaker 1: It's pretty crazy. So just another thing, like I said,
Speaker 1: it just this whole stress test on the country just
Speaker 1: exposes these cracks, and it's just another thing that we
Speaker 1: now we know we need to update. We need to
Speaker 1: either get out of these systems, move over to other systems,
Speaker 1: or something. I mean, it just needs to be modernized overall.
Speaker 1: People have been sounding the alarm for modernization for years,
Speaker 1: but it takes a crisis. Unfortunately, we've seen this time
Speaker 1: and time again in other parts of the government. It
Speaker 1: takes a crisis for lawmakers to react and fix things.
Speaker 1: So maybe in the next couple of months we'll see
Speaker 1: some additional money handed to states to update these systems.
Speaker 1: Mchannic Kelly, policy reporter at The Verge, Thank you very
Speaker 1: much for joining us. Hey, thanks glad to be here.
Speaker 1: I'm Oscar Romeiraz and this has been your daily coronavirus update.
Speaker 1: Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can
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