The relaunch of a government relief program for small firms got off to a rocky start Monday, with lenders reporting being shut out of the overwhelmed U.S. Small Business Administration’s system amid a flood of loan applications and concerns about when struggling companies will get the funding they need.
The SBA said that “unprecedented demand” was slowing down its loan-processing platform, and that there were double the number of users accessing the system compared with any day during the initial round of funding that ended April 16. The SBA said in a statement that it had processed more than 100,000 applications from more than 4,000 lenders as of 3:30 p.m. New York time.
