UPDATE: The new way to file a complaint is by submitting it through an online form on the state’s website.

Less than an hour after Gov. Phil Murphy provided a phone number to file complaints against employers in New Jersey violating his executive order to combat the coronavirus, the phone line became overloaded and was redirecting emergency calls, officials said.

During his daily press briefing on the outbreak, Murphy said some non-essential businesses have been defying his order for employees to only come in if they are deemed essential or to work from home.

“It is an order,” the governor said. “No one, and I mean no one, who can do their job from home should be going to the office.”

Murphy shared a phone number for people to report the businesses. By 3:30, the call line was overwhelmed with phone numbers, and people found their calls redirected to other state offices.

Shortly after NJ Advance Media posted the story with the telephone number, a State Police official asked the number to be taken down because the phone line was getting overloaded and it was interfering with emergency calls.

“The number of calls was inundating a line that’s dedicated to other purposes,” Sgt. Lawrence Peele said, noting several of those were “law enforcement sensitive calls.”

One reporter who called the original number said she was redirected to the state’s Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness tip line.

A spokesman for Murphy’s office said they’re working to put a new link on the website where employees can file complaints.

On Tuesday, Murphy announced the state has at least 3,675 known cases of COVID-19 — the illness caused by the virus — including 44 deaths throughout the state. That makes New Jersey the state with the second most coronavirus cases in the country, after neighboring New York.

The number of confirmed cases in New Jersey has skyrocketed in recent days as new government-run testing centers draw large lines of people seeking to discover if they’ve contracted the virus that has spread across the world. State officials say they expect the numbers to keep increase thanks to more testing and more evidence of community spread of the virus, which causes the illness COVID-19.

Murphy has taken dramatic actions to limit human interaction in an effort to slow the spread of the virus by closing all schools in the state, ordering people to stay at home except for necessary travel, banning social gatherings, and ordering non-essential businesses to close until further notice.

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Sophie Nieto-Munoz may be reached at snietomunoz@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her at @snietomunoz. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Matt Arco may be reached at marco@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewArco or Facebook.

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