Here is the opening statement from the Department of Labor:

In the week ending July 22, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 244,000, an increase of 10,000 from the previous week's revised level. The previous week's level was revised up by 1,000 from 233,000 to 234,000. The 4-week moving average was 244,000, unchanged from the previous week's revised average. The previous week's average was revised up by 250 from 243,750 to 244,000. [See full report]

Today's seasonally adjusted 244K new claims, up 10K from last week's revised number, was worse than the Investing.com forecast of 241K.

Here is a close look at the data over the past few years (with a callout for the past year), which gives a clearer sense of the overall trend in relation to the last recession and the volatility in recent months.

As we can see, there's a good bit of volatility in this indicator, which is why the 4-week moving average (the highlighted number) is a more useful number than the weekly data. Here is the complete data series.

The headline Unemployment Insurance data is seasonally adjusted. What does the non-seasonally adjusted data look like? See the chart below, which clearly shows the extreme volatility of the non-adjusted data (the red dots). The 4-week MA gives an indication of the recurring pattern of seasonal change (note, for example, those regular January spikes).