Alyssa Vasquez, 3, waits with her parents Tuesday as they wait to be called to a counter at the East Sahara Avenue Department of Motor Vehicles office.
Tuesday, Nov. 20, 2012 | 5:42 p.m.
People visiting Department of Motor Vehicles sites across Nevada on Monday and Tuesday may have found their wait times even longer than normal, after access to a national database slowed to a crawl.
Kevin Malone, public information officer for the Nevada DMV, said the nationwide Problem Driver Pointers System was returning information on inquiries back at an exceedingly slow pace much of Monday and into Tuesday morning.
When a person renews or applies for new Nevada license, that person’s name is entered into the nationwide system to determine whether, for instance, he or she has a license that has been suspended or revoked in another state.
“We can’t issue driver's licenses unless and until we check it,” Malone explained.
The slowdown may have affected various DMV offices around the state differently, he said. Some offices stopped processing driver's licenses completely; others plodded on through the slowdown.
At the Henderson DMV, customers were told they couldn’t get their driver's licenses until the computer problem was resolved, for instance.
Malone said that in DMV offices that continued processing licenses, the usually instantaneous check of the problem drivers system could take from seconds to up to 20 minutes.
The national database issues were resolved and business was back to normal just before 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, Malone said.
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