Cayla Harris reports in the Times Union that while about one in ten Americans are now out of a job, anyone unemployed in New York has been hearing a lot of hold music, as many have not been able to get through to state's Department of Labor. So New York will unveil a new unemployment application April 10 with fewer questions. And anyone who leaves any fields blank will now get a call back from a state employee within 72 hours, the Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRosa claimed during an April 9 press conference. “They’re going to be reaching out directly to the people so that people don’t have to go through this infuriating process of calling and getting busy signals and thereby collapsing the system,” DeRosa said. The Department of Labor has received about 810,000 unemployment claims since March 9, and about 600,000 have been successfully processed. But many more people have not gotten past the hold music. Google Cloud, Deloitte, and Verizon are now helping the state with its 16,000 percent increase in phone calls and 1,600 percent increase in web traffic compared to a usual week. On April 8 Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced an additional $600 in weekly unemployment benefits that would extend by another 13 weeks, to a total of 39 weeks. On April 9 he promised that unemployment benefits will be retroactive to the date a person lost their job. Read more about this story in the Times Union.