NEW ORLEANS — All day Thursday, state agencies experienced computer outages that halted critical operations.
Thursday morning, the Office of Motor Vehicles reported the outages, and later more offices said they were seeing a similar problem.
Jordan Collins was unable to get his driver's license reinstated at the OMV to start his new job.
“Keep calling up to the DMV and keep getting, ‘Oh, we’re having technical difficulties,’ and I was like, I need this done today because they wanted me to start today," Collins said, “So, you know that’s money missing out of my pocket, and my family’s pocket and I was like man this is not good.”
According to Jacques Berry, spokesman for the Division of Administration, the outage was caused by a hardware failure.
"Crews are reported to be working now to install new hardware, reroute everything, and get the systems back up," Berry said.
Berry said the Louisiana executive brand was affected, but higher education and elected officials were not.
The outage also took aim at the Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, the Department of Health, the Department of Public Safety, the Department of Education, and the Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
The Department of Children and Family Services was also impacted, and it sounded the alarm that the Child Abuse and Neglect Hotline was down. People are urged to make emergency reports to law enforcement until the hotline is working again.
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