Visa Lawyer Blog
It has been reported that this Wednesday, July 23, the State Department’s global database for issuing travel documents has crashed, resulting in major delays for potentially millions of people around the world waiting for U.S. passports and visas.
Unspecified glitches in State Department’s Consular Consolidated Database have resulted in “significant performance issues, including outages” in the processing of applications for passports, visas and reports of Americans born abroad since Saturday. Spokeswoman Marie Harf said the problem is worldwide and not specific to any particular country, citizenship document, or visa category.
This failure may cause hardship to applicants waiting on visas and passports. State Department is working to correct the issue as quickly as possible.
It was not immediately clear how many people are affected, but two U.S. officials familiar with the situation said some 50,000 applicants were hit in one country alone. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly or identify the country.
The database is the State Department’s system of record and is used to approve, record and print visas and other documents to ensure that national security checks are conducted on applicants.
We will follow up with further updates. For more information please contact our office.