The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles could not process thousands of new or renewal driver’s license and identification card applications for a fifth straight day Monday, thanks to a computer malfunction that has crippled technology departments at roughly two dozen state agencies.
A failure at one of the state’s data centers near Richmond pulled more than 200 storage servers offline last week, and the DMV and roughly half a dozen other agencies have yet to recover.
“For a day, I might be able to understand this problem. But since Thursday? Unbelievable,” said Martin Delaney, 53, who visited the state’s Mill Road DMV branch in Alexandria early Monday afternoon.
Delaney, accompanied by his wife and son, said he was new to the area and needed an up-to-date license to enroll his son in school.
“I drove here from Fairfax, and I need my license to register my son so he can attend school next Tuesday. Now I don’t know what we’re going to do,” Delaney said.
The Delaneys were among the many people who visited the Mill Road DMV on Monday, only to be turned away until further notice.
The driver’s licenses or ID cards of roughly 5,000 Virginians have expired since the computer problems began Thursday, according to DMV spokeswoman Melanie Stokes. Despite her department’s efforts to notify the public of the disruption, angry customers like Delaney are still storming out of DMV offices.
“We’ve definitely got some frustrated people, and we can’t blame them,” Stokes said.
To make matters worse, the computer problems are expected to persist for at least another day, Stokes said.
“We’ve been told there’s no estimated recovery time, so we know the system won’t be back up Tuesday,” she said.
August is one of the busiest months of the year for Virginia’s DMV. Roughly 530,000 people visit the state’s 74 DMV branches in August compared with a monthly average of about 480,000 the rest of the year, Stokes said.
Other state agencies are enduring similar computer-related issues.
Virginia’s information technology agency, which manages most of the state’s computer services, reported Monday that the departments of social services, board of elections, taxation, juvenile justice and environmental quality continued to experience problems related to the server failure.
DMV experienced unrelated computer problems earlier this month when the agency’s connection to the National Driver Registry was severed, preventing motor vehicle department employees from issuing or renewing driver’s licenses for roughly seven hours.
