California Department of Motor Vehicles [DMV] customers were inconvenienced by a state-wide computer outage for half hour on Friday morning.
All of the state's 173 field offices were effected between 8 and 8:30 a.m. Friday, May 11, according to Marty Greenstein, a California DMV spokesperson. During that time, customers could not complete driver’s license applications, register vehicles, and other computer based services, Greenstein said.
Greenstein said all offices are now operating normally. Officials attributed the brief halt to computer based services to a server malfunction.
A customer who attempted to use services at the Folsom location took to reddit to voice their frustration.
“Took the day off, went to the Folsom DMV to register a new car, got to the end of that long snaking line, and as soon as I did, somebody came out and said their whole system crashed! Some people stayed, but I left. Just wanted you fine people to know,” reddit user RallyMK1 said.
During computer outages, customers can still take driving tests, schedule appointments, do paperwork, and get questions answered, according to the California DMV website.
In October 2016, a catastrophic computer failure halted many services at 122 offices across the state for several days. DMV officials said that outage was caused by a digital storage failure in the departments primary and backup systems.
