About 1,800 customers were turned away from Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles offices across the state Monday as the agency faced problems with its connection to the National Driver Registry.
The database never came up when agency workers started the day at 8 a.m., and the connection wasn’t restored until 2:55 p.m. The agency was unable to issue or renew driver’s licenses for nearly seven hours.
The database allows the agency to check driver information against the databases of other states.
All 74 DMV offices were affected.
“If you’re at Virginia DMV trying to renew today, you’re unable to right now, because we have to be able to check you don’t have a DUI in Massachusetts, for example,” spokeswoman Melanie Stokes said during the outage.
Stokes said the DMV experienced the problem once before within the last few years, but that the disconnect only last a few hours.
The database is operated by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators and Verizon.
