Hawaii Turns Off Their Unemployment Insurance Website Outside of Business Hours

The Hawaii Unemployment Insurance portal becomes unavailable outside of their normal stated business hours. This can be surprising if one’s baseline assumption is that websites should always be up and their functionality doesn’t change whether it’s 9AM on a Monday or 2AM on a Saturday.

The idea of business hours for a website is kind of a good idea if the thing behind the website is actual people doing the job. If it can’t actually do anything for you during non-business hours, then why fake it? Adding queues makes state agencies eventually consistent.

On the other hand, people from a different timezone or odd working hours will find this approach inaccessible. Why should your timezone affect our ability to communicate from my timezone?