On the afternoon of Oct. 24, the California Department of Motor Vehicles experienced a major computer outage that impacted multiple offices statewide. While some offices are back up and running, many remain down, according to an official statement.
“Crews have been working all night to rebuild the system and get offices back up and running,” the statement reads. “The offices that are still down will continue providing drive tests, making return appointments, helping with paperwork and answering customer’s questions.”
Offices are coming online slowly, said DMV Public Information Officer Artemio Armenta, adding that online services are still available, and the department is updating its list of affected offices on its website. And at 5 p.m. on Oct. 25, Armenta said the DMV anticipated that all field offices would be up and running on Wednesday morning, Oct. 26.
"We ... apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused," said Armenta, who also confirmed that the outage is not due to a cyberattack.
"The catastrophic failure was the loss of several hard disks in a primary and backup system," he told Government Technology via email, also noting that the department "got messaging on our social media platform for customers (Facebook, Twitter) ..."
The DMV suffered a statewide computer outage in mid-August 2012 that disrupted many in-office services at the time. Computers went down at DMV field offices around 8 a.m. after a problem occurred at the state Office of Technology Services, but as of 12:20 p.m. that same day, officials said services had returned to normal.
Whether the two incidents are related is not yet known. "We’re still assessing," Armenta said. "Our primary concern is to get service up for our customers."
This story was published by Government Technology.
