OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) – The Oklahoma Employment Security Commission is busier than ever as the number of unemployment claims in the state continues to rise.

Currently, OESC has 84 employees taking calls with 130 more people from other agencies on the way next week.

“We have about 1,000 phone line reports over there at OESC. While we’re working with AT&T to secure more we don’t have the staff to actually man those,” Robin Roberson, Exec. Dir. Ok Employment Security Commission, said.

But there’s another problem, which is being able to call people back.

“People aren’t going to want to hear this, but I just want to be factual. We’re going to start limiting the number of phone calls in the queue,” Roberson said. “They’ll be receiving a busy signal. The reason why is at 8:30 this morning, all 1,000 were tapped out, and our employees can’t make calls outbound to work on cases so it’s really clogging up the process.”

OESC is implementing more technology, including an A.I. chat bot to the website, more bandwidth and a new look as well.

They are asking those who can claim through the website to do so while they take calls from people who don’t have the internet.