Thanks to the failure of a system used to collect and transmit fingerprints and photos, the US State Department has been unable to issue visas to travelers or guest workers for the past two weeks, The New York Times reports. While some of the systems related to visa processing have been restored, biometric information is still not being processed, leaving many travelers from outside the US and hundreds of agricultural "guest workers" stranded.
State Department officials told the Times that the issue was related to a hardware failure. In an e-mail to the paper, Consular Affairs spokesperson Ashley Garrigus said that there had been data corruption caused by a hardware failure, which had been replicated to the biometric database's backup system. “While switching to the backup system," Garrigus wrote, "we discovered that the data was damaged and unusable. We deeply regret the inconvenience to travelers and recognize the hardship to those waiting for visas, and in some cases, their family members or employers in the United States.”
The State Department normally processes about 50,000 visa applications a day, according to a statement on the outage on the agency's website. But that number surges seasonally as employers bring in laborers (mostly from Mexico) to harvest crops. On top of that, the overall number of visas annually has grown. Earlier this year, the State Department put out a "sources sought" call for a new facial recognition service because of the huge growth in visa requests, especially those driven by the H2-A and H2-B visa programs.
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