The state labor depart­ment has shut down its tool for cer­ti­fy­ing peo­ple for extra $300 week­ly unem­ploy­ment pay­ments until it is sure the sys­tem can meet demand, offi­cials said Wednesday.

The shut­down will not affect people’s abil­i­ty to col­lect mon­ey they are enti­tled to through the Lost Wages Assis­tance pro­gram, offi­cials say.

The Col­orado Depart­ment of Labor and Employ­ment launched the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion func­tion, accessed through its “vir­tu­al agent” auto­mat­ed cus­tomer ser­vice sys­tem, on Fri­day, deputy exec­u­tive direc­tor Cher Haavind said in an email Wednesday.

The cer­ti­fi­ca­tion tool worked well over the week­end, lead­ing the depart­ment to con­tact more than 220,000 peo­ple on the state’s unem­ploy­ment rolls Mon­day to encour­age them to call in or log on and cer­ti­fy their eli­gi­bil­i­ty, Haavind said in a email.

By that evening, the sys­tem began strug­gling with the demand and pre­vent­ing some users for com­plet­ing the process. Ser­vices out­ages became more fre­quen­cy on Tues­day. On Wednes­day, the state shut the cer­ti­fi­ca­tion tool until state offi­cials feel con­fi­dent it can meet demand and pro­vide a more reli­able user expe­ri­ence for peo­ple, Haavind said.

The time­line for when that might be is unclear. The labor depart­ment is work­ing with its tech­nol­o­gy ven­dor, Google, to trou­bleshoot the problem.

“Through­out Tues­day evening and Wednes­day, all resources have been allo­cat­ed to fix­ing load bal­anc­ing issues, time­outs, and deter­min­ing a viable path for­ward,” Haavind wrote in an email update. “The team and ven­dors con­tin­ue to work on a res­o­lu­tion that will accom­mo­date the vol­ume and we will pro­vide an update once the sys­tem is stable.”

Haavind empha­sized that the tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties will not pre­vent peo­ple from col­lect­ing Lost Wages Assis­tance mon­ey. As many 350,000 peo­ple in Col­orado are eli­gi­ble for the pro­gram cre­at­ed last month. As of Wednes­day, more than 16,000 had cer­ti­fied that they lost their jobs or wages as a result of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, a require­ment fed­er­al offi­cials put in place for col­lect­ing the extra payments.

Col­orado has applied the max­i­mum six weeks worth of pro­gram fund­ing, a peri­od cov­er­ing July 26 though Sept. 5. It has been approved for five weeks worth. As of Tues­day, the state was still wait­ing for approval for the sixth and final week.

The first pay­ments are expect­ed to go out at the end of this week, Haavind said.