Oregon Employment Department's economic website offline after domain registration expires

The Oregon Employment Department’s website for posting economic data went offline over the weekend, apparently because the state neglected to renew the registration for its domain name.

The loss of Oregon’s qualityinfo.org page didn’t affect unemployment claims, which are managed on a separate website. After an inquiry from The Oregonian/OregonLive on Monday, the department said it now has renewed the domain name and said the site will be back online by evening. (Update: The website did indeed return Monday afternoon.)

But the outage is another embarrassing technological lapse for the department, which stumbled repeatedly in 2020 amid a flood of jobless claims triggered by the pandemic.

Qualityinfo.org hosts the employment department’s monthly announcement of the state’s unemployment rate (it’s due to announce May’s rate on Tuesday), information about regional economic conditions and analysis by the department’s economists. Businesses, lawmakers and others use the data to make decisions about strategy and policy.

Read more: https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2021/06/oregon-employment-departments-economic-website-offline-after-domain-lease-expires.html