Extended Hours At Secretary Of State Offices
DETROIT (WWJ) - Good news for those waiting in line at Secretary of State offices across Michigan. State officials said business resumed as normal Friday morning after a mainframe computer problem shut down operations at all 131 Michigan Secretary of State branches for over 24 hours.
The glitch also affected other state departments, including corrections, treasury, community health and human services.
Officials said they have fixed a broken fiber link, but technicians will continue the work to remove corrupted files that have impacted the applications on the mainframe.
The 131 Secretary of State branch offices across the state are now able to complete business transactions for citizens, and internal processes at other state agencies impacted by the outage are now fully functional.
Branches across the state will be extending their hours through Monday, as state officials said it will take time to address the backlog created by the outage.
Extended hours are:
- Friday, May 20 -- All branch offices will be open two hours later, from 9 am to 7 pm
- Saturday, May 21 -- The department's seven SUPER!Centers will be open an extra two hours, from 9 am to 2 pm
- Monday, May 23 -- All branches will be open two hours later, from 9 am to 7 pm
In addition, the Secretary of State's office announced that late fees will be waived for affected customers coming into the branches through the end of business on Friday, May 27th.
WWJ's Mike Campbell spoke with Detroiter Brenda Erwin who was visiting the Mack and Altar Road branch for the third time in two days. Friday, she was pleased to find she'd be given some preferential treatment.
"If you come and you don't get waited on, they give you a pink slip and then you don't have to pull a number when you come back. So, all the people that are here for the first time and pull numbers, we get to go in front of them," Erwin said.
Erwin said the pink slips seem to be helping, but the lines were still long.
