Federal server crashes and loses 70,000 job applications

If you have been looking for a job and recently applied at a federal agency, you need to check the status of your application. Apparently, the online hiring system the federal government uses went down for a few days last week. The system takes applications, ranks them, and rates the apps so that positions can be filled. The server was online two days after the crash.

However, the outage meant that job applications submitted during a certain time frame were lost. The period that apps were lost in ran from August 7 to about midday on August 9. If you put in an application then you may need to resubmit it. Apparently, the outage happened after a routine maintenance upgrade to the server.

OPM says that no data was compromised or breached because of the crash. Apparently, all of the applications and the agencies looking to fill spots have been made aware of the outage and the people were asked to reapply. This also means that the vacancy period for some positions is being extended. At least this time none of the data was lost and it appears the outage was not the result of hackers.

[via Federaltimes]