When Andrea Russo lost her job this past summer, she needed money, and she needed it fast.

Russo, a single mother who worked for Microsoft out of its Cambridge, Massachusetts, office, was abruptly let go as part of widespread downsizing throughout the company. After the tech giant cut her position, Russo had to rent out her house while she and her daughter, a high school senior, moved in with a friend. Her son who recently graduated from college is taking on a greater share of his student loans than was initially planned. Russo has had to dip into her savings account each month to live while she continues to look for full-time work in a tough job market — and fight what’s been an exhausting battle against state bureaucracy to get the unemployment insurance benefits she needs.

Five months later, she’s still fighting.

After weekly calls to the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA), being placed on hold for 45 minutes, in-person visits to state offices, and being told that “we’re escalating” the situation too many times to count, Russo is still without a full-time job and without financial support. She initially filed for benefits with the state in August, according to a copy of her claim viewed by CommonWealth Beacon, yet she hasn’t received a dime in unemployment insurance benefits and is still without so much as a tangible status update about where her case stands and what issues are preventing the money from being disbursed.

“I’ve never been unemployed before. I’ve had a job since I was 14 years old,” said Russo, a Rhode Island resident who filed for unemployment in Massachusetts because that’s where she was employed. “For once in my life, I need help, and I just feel let down.”

Russo’s claim is just a fraction of the mounting cases that piled up at the DUA over the better part of 2025, where an unemployment system that was already falling short of key federal performance metrics stumbled into a new crisis.

In each month between June and October, at least 4 in 10 new unemployment claims filed in Massachusetts by eligible workers went unpaid for 35 days or longer, according to federal data.

By that measure, Massachusetts was the worst-performing state in the nation over that span.

Anywhere from one-fifth to one-third of new claims in each of those months still hadn’t been paid within 70 days, forcing thousands of people to wait more than two months for aid to which they believe themselves entitled.

Ironically, it was the state’s implementation of a new system meant to modernize and streamline the delivery of unemployment benefits that prompted the meltdown. A confluence of factors emerged: The new system’s technology, which includes enhanced tools for fraud prevention, led to a steep jump in the number of issues flagged in claimants’ applications, and it took significantly longer for claimants to get hearings to resolve those issues, just as DUA staff underwent required trainings on the new platform that took them away from their normal duties.