NJ State Government Slowed by Data Center Outage

A power outage in a New Jersey state data center knocked out services for a number of state agencies, including the Motor Vehicle Commission and many state web sites.

New Jersey said that one of the state's three main data center facilities experienced a power outage this morning at about 5 a.m., interrupting service for state web sites operated by the Office of Information Technology in the N.J. Treasury department. Power was restored by 9 a.m., but it took longer to restore service at state web sites. Many were back online before 1 p.m., but others were slower being restored, according to Treasury spokesman Bill Quinn

"We're not sure at this point if all the functionality is there, so we're being a little cautious," Quinn told NJ.com. "It's going to be later in the day before full functionality is back on these websites."

The outage knocked out online services at 39 offices of the Motor Vehicle Commission (MVC), frustrating New Jersey residents seeking to get driver's licenses or renew registrations.

The incident was the third outage this summer for New Jersey IT systems, which had downtime on July 24 and July 19, when a fire alarm at a state data center caused an automatic shutdown of servers. There was no actual fire in the data center.