County clerk slams weeklong DMV outage
Merola calls on agency leadership to explain system malfunction
Merola calls on agency to explain system malfunction.
Following week-long problems with the state Department of Motor Vehicles’ computer system, Rensselaer County Clerk Frank J. Merola called on the agency’s leadership to fully explain the malfunction, which has prohibited the scheduling of all commercial, regular and motorcycle road tests.
“This is a completely unacceptable situation.” Merola said in a prepared statement on Thursday. “I can understand the system going down for a few hours, maybe a day, but to be down for a full week leads me to believe that there are major issues with the system that DMV is not revealing.”
Merola said that with young drivers coming in for permit and road tests, April is the busiest month for DMVS. But he said that there had been no explanation for the outage — only a statement on the DMV website. That statement reads that, “the Schedule a Road Test system (both phone and online) is currently down. We expect to have it restored soon. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
“Commissioner (Mark) Schroeder needs to immediately address this issue and inform New York State residents the reasons why this system has been down for a full week, severely crippling DMV services,” Merola said. “There have been recent articles in our local newspaper questioning County cybersecurity measures during the COVID crisis. I am wondering if these same people will now question the state DMV on cybersecurity measures, especially since the county has never been down for a week.”
A DMV spokeswoman said on Friday that “the vendor that hosts our road test scheduling system is experiencing an outage.
“The vendor is actively working to resolve the issue, and we continue to conduct road tests for individuals who scheduled their appointment prior to the outage. We expect service to be restored soon.”
The Times Union had reported that in early 2020, there was a massive cyberattack that disabled some state agency information systems and took nearly a month to resolve.