Frustration grows at Bay Area DMV offices after 'technical glitch' causes delays

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ByChris Nguyen KGO logo
Friday, September 21, 2018
Frustration grows at local DMV offices after 'technical glitch' causes delays
The DMV says a major outage that affected locations in the Bay Area and across California has been fixed, but delays still persist.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- There are more problems for the California Department of Motor Vehicles as a technical glitch forced major delays at dozens of field offices across the state.

"It's always frustrating when you go to the DMV," said Oakland resident Louisa Lynn. "They're still kind of doing the things that we were doing 10 years ago and still working in an archaic system that can't seem to keep up with the population of drivers."

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As lines continued to grow throughout the morning, DMV engineers scrambled to fix a router issue that stalled services and transactions from being processed.

"The earliest appointment I was able to get was in December... and I can't wait until then to get a replacement ID," said Richard Alcera of Hayward.

The DMV was criticized in recent months for skyrocketing wait times, which until Thursday's hiccup, had reportedly been getting better. Officials say the outage occurred overnight but went unnoticed until employees came into work Thursday morning.

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"It is kind of upsetting. It's like I'm kind of mad at myself, too, for losing my ID, but at the same time, it's like I wish this line would move faster so that I could get out of here as soon as possible," says Alcera.

The agency hopes to modernize its decades-old computer system within the next four years, but until then, many customers are trying to take it all in stride.

"When things go wrong, they're wrong. It's not going to go smoothly, so you just have to kind of accept it," said Fremont resident Corey Freund.

Some DMV field offices reported computer outages lasting up to four hours. At least 12 locations in the Bay Area were impacted.

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