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Missoula County to use new system after DMV computers crash

The DMV had been having issues with their systems for over a week prior to the crash.
Posted at 9:10 AM, Aug 04, 2019
and last updated 2019-08-04 11:10:42-04

More than 300 people visit the Department of Motor Vehicles every day in Missoula.

A crash of their computer systems on Friday left employees scrambling.

The cause of the outage still isn't clear, but the Montana Department of Justice reports they did find the source of the problem.

The DMV had been having issues with their systems for over a week prior to the crash.

A computer technician was scheduled to visit Missoula this week, but the computers crashed Friday morning and didn't come back on until around 2 p.m.

Now that the system is back online, county officials plan to catch up by using a brand new program that hasn't yet been tested.

"We just actually just this week got the state to approve us doing a pilot program so that we could process transactions via email instead of having you come into our office," Missoula County Cleark and Treasurer Tyler Gernant said.

"And so we haven't started that pilot program yet, but were hoping that we can do that by mid-August," he added. "So we're basically picking parts of that program which is the online payment system and using that."

People headed down to the Missoula County Courthouse to register their vehicles should expect two hour wait times while staff works through the backlog.