The normally chaotic Department of Motor Vehicles was off the charts chaotic Tuesday morning.
That's because the computers were down at all field offices up and down the state until about noon..
The DMV tweeted just after 9 a.m.: DMV is currently experiencing technical difficulties that may affect customer transactions. We appreciate your patience.
Early on in the outage, it only impacted the offices, but by mid-morning on-line services were off line too.
DMV spokeswoman Jessica Gonzalez said the problem was fixed around noon, adding employees were catching up on the backlog created by network problem. She said field offices were anticipating a busy next few days as a result of rescheduled appointments and other delays connected to the outage.
The only appointments that were be fulfilled during the outage were driving tests.
NBC Bay Area's Bob Redell found a line out the door and around the side o f the building at the DMV in Santa Clara. Redell said most people were sticking it out in hopes that the problem would be fixed.
Local
The cause of the outage was a communications issue between AT&T and Verizon networks.
Adam Dondro, spokesman for the state technology agency, compared the problem to when a home or office experiences Internet connection problems and routers have to be reset.
He said state workers needed to identify the router that broke down, which disconnected DMV's computers from its network.
"We haven't been able to isolate it,'' Dondro told AP during the outage. "It's somewhere between one of (the DMV) routers and either our technology router or a Verizon router. We've been kind of peeling the onion to try to figure out where it is and haven't been able to nail it down yet.''
Dondro said a separate technology issue that impacted other state agencies has also been repaired. A circuit reconfiguration early Tuesday morning took down other state networks, including the Department of Consumer Affairs, he said.
"All systems in the state are back up and running, including DMV," Dondro told AP.
