U.S. State Department Global Passport, Visa Issuing Operations Disrupted - IEEE Spectrum
Last week saw an overflowing cornucopia of IT problems, challenges and failures being reported. From these rich pickings, we decided to focus this week’s edition of IT Hiccups first on a multi-day computer problem affecting the US Department of State’ passport and visa operations, followed by a quick rundown of the numerous US and UK government IT project failures that were also disclosed last week.
According to the Associated Press, beginning on Saturday, 21 July, the U.S. Department of State has being experiencing unspecified computer problems including “significant performance issues, including outages” with its Consular Consolidated Database [pdf], which has interfered with the “processing of passports, visas, and reports of Americans born abroad.” A story at ComputerWorld indicates that the problems began after maintenance was performed on the database. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told the AP that the computer problem effects were being felt across the globe.
The AP story says that a huge passport and visa application backlog is already forming, with one unidentified country already reporting that the backlog of applications had reached 50,000 as of Wednesday. The growing backlog has also “hampered efforts to get the system fully back on line,” Haff told AP.
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