The Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration's driver's license-issuing system crashed for more than three hours Monday morning, officials said.
The outage was discovered at the 8:30 a.m. opening of branches across the state, when employees found themselves unable to process driver's license transactions, MVA spokesman Chuck Brown said.
The crash did not affect the entire system. Some of the work stations at some branches remained operational during the outage, Brown said.
The issue was fixed at all locations except a few of the work stations in Annapolis by about noon, he said.
The MVA announced the situation to customers in English and Spanish, and employees distributed "fast passes," which allow customers to skip the line, to those who were kept waiting during the system crash, Brown said.
The administration is investigating what caused the outage.
"We're working to pinpoint [the cause] now," Brown said. "The effort was to fix it and get the system up and running."
The state no longer distributes driver's licenses at the MVA locations, instead mailing the new, more secure licenses and identification cards to customers as a fraud-prevention measure.
The Monday outage did not affect the MVA's vehicle licensing operations, which distributes license plates and vehicle registrations, Brown said.
The administration on Monday began issuing the state's new "Maryland Pride" license plates, which bear the state flag along the bottom.
Separately, the MVA's Gaithersburg office experienced a power outage just before noon that lasted about 40 minutes, Brown said.
twitter.com/cmcampbell6