Illinois residents faced a brief snag in U.S. passport verification on Wednesday when a nationwide outage impacted the service across state facilities, state officials have confirmed. The glitch, which began in the morning, was announced by Illinois Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias around 9:30 a.m.
The Secretary of State's office was quick to implement a contingency plan, stating, "We activated a process that we put in place to enable us to process U.S. passports and immigration documents from other countries at our DMV facilities. We are not experiencing any delays at our DMVs as a result," according to a statement obtained by FOX 32 Chicago.
With the state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) functioning normally, the Secretary of State's office assured the public that there were no delays in DMV operations. "Details on the nationwide outage were not immediately available," as stated by CBS News Chicago.
In response to the outage, Giannoulias had advised residents to call ahead before visiting DMV locations as services and, hours may be impacted. The phone number provided for these inquiries was 800-252-8980, as per CBS News Chicago.
