“Computer Glitch Blamed For Nationwide EBT System Shutdown On Saturday”
October 12th, 2013There’s no shortage of imbeciles on the Internet predicting certain doom every five minutes, but the dole situation is something that Cryptogon readers in the U.S. need to watch carefully—unless you think that tens of millions of heavily armed, broke and hungry people aren’t any cause for concern.
“Normal operations” depend on the availability of the EBT system. If it was to go down for an extended period of time, my guess is that there’s a two to three day window before all hell would break loose in affected areas. That might be an overly optimistic assessment.
Via: CBS:
People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure.
At about 9 a.m. Saturday, reports from across the country began pouring in that customers’ EBT cards were not working in stores.
At 2 p.m., an EBT customer service representative told CBS Boston that the system was currently down for a computer system upgrade.
Xerox spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer released further details later in the afternoon in an emailed statement.
“While the electronic benefits system is now up and running, beneficiaries in the 17 affected states continue to experience connectivity issues to access their benefits. Technical staff is addressing the issue and expect the system to be restored soon,” Wasmer said. “Beneficiaries requiring access to their benefits can work with their local retailers who can activate an emergency voucher system where available. We appreciate our clients’ patience while we work through this outage as quickly as possible.”
Wasmer said the affected states also included Alabama, California, Georgia, Iowa, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.
U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe said the outage is not related to the government shutdown.
Shoppers left carts of groceries behind at a packed Market Basket grocery store in Biddeford, Maine, because they couldn’t get their benefits, said fellow shopper Barbara Colman, of Saco, Maine. The manager put up a sign saying the EBT system was not in use. Colman, who receives the benefits, called an 800 telephone line for the program and it said the EBT system was down due to maintenance, she said.
