Community reacts after nearly two-day outage at NC DMV

RALEIGH, N.C. (WNCN) — Thursday evening, systems at Division Motor Vehicles offices across North Carolina were back up and running after major system outages led to long lines and hours of waiting this week.

According to the N.C. Department of Transportation, connections were restored around 3:15 p.m. and DMV offices resumed processing transactions. Still, the outages caused a lot of problems for people who came in for services.

"I knew there was going to be a wait because it's the DMV, but not this long," said Lauren Hiller, waiting in line Thursday afternoon at a Raleigh DMV off Atlantic Ave.

NC DMV services back up after outages at offices across the state paused transactions

Hiller said she had been waiting more than three hours – arriving at 10 a.m.

"I'm worried that I'm not going to get it taken care of. And I took the day off work again to try to get it done," she said.

Hiller was trying to get her license renewed, something she has been trying to do for months, but she has struggled to find a DMV with enough time for walk-ins, and appointments are booked months in advance.

"I'm getting married in nine days, so I need to get my license renewed and so I can get my marriage certificate. So I got to get it taken care of," she said.

However, like everyone in line on Thursday, she was stuck for several hours because of the system issues.

North Carolina's Department of Information Technology was having mainframe computer connection issues, which started causing sporadic outages on Wednesday.

"There were folks in front of me standing [who] came yesterday, the system was down and they were waiting for like four or five hours to finally be turned away," said Erica Johnson, also waiting in line.

Offices statewide stopped processing transactions Thursday, and online services and self-service kiosks also went down. Many people stayed in line for a few more hours, hoping to make it inside the building.

"You know, it takes a lot of time. I don't want to spend all day trying to just get something as simple as just renewing an ID," Johnson said.

Caden Knight was in line with his dad Troy, hoping to retake his permit test.

"We're going to stay here. We already skipped school, so you might want to stay as long as you can," he said.

DMV employees told people waiting in line Thursday afternoon they have to process appointments before they can take walk-ins.

"Those appointments are 90 days, and some of them have been here since 7:00 this morning," a DMV employee told the line.

Caden's dad Troy said, "We're not expecting to get in, but we're going to wait here for a couple more hours and hopefully we do. And if not, got to come back another day."

Some people, like Hiller, were able to get what they needed if they were around when systems came back online, but several people who left the DMV earlier said they were not able to get service and would have to come back.