BATON ROUGE, La. — The Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles says most of their computer systems are coming back online but branch offices remain closed following a statewide network outage.
The OMV says they won’t be able to service drivers until Monday.
“While most systems are back online following yesterday’s hardware failure, we’re still experiencing connectivity issues with Office of Motor Vehicles locations. All OMV field offices statewide will be closed until Monday, May 22,” the OMV said in a statement released Friday.
The network outage crippled state agencies including The Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the Department of Children and Family Services, the Louisiana Office of State Fire Marshal, and the Department of Health among a growing list of state offices and services.
The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries announced Monday that their network service has been restored, including email and telephone systems.
A spokesperson for the Louisiana Division of Administration, Jacques Berry, tells WWLTV that the outage was caused by a hardware failure that affected the main system as well as the redundancy backup systems.
Internet service, email service, and system applications for the Louisiana executive branch were also affected, but the outage did not impact higher education or elected officials' systems.
Crews are working to install new hardware, reroute the network services, and get the systems back online.
This is not the first time a network outage impacted state network services.
In November 2019, Governor John Bel Edwards issued a State of Emergency following the ransomware attack on Louisiana which crippled the OMV field offices.
During that time, the declaration allowed several state agencies to take action, including waiving fees and fines.
Ten percent of the state's 5,000 computer network servers that power operations across state government and 1,600 desktop computers were damaged by the 2019 ransomware attack.
► Get breaking news from your neighborhood delivered directly to you by downloading the new FREE WWL-TV News app now in the IOS App Store or Google Play.