Visa backlog may take weeks to be fixed.
The American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: H1B visa interviews in India have been canceled or rescheduled because of the major computer crash in the State Department’s passport and visa issuing system, which almost crippled the system, and has led to a visa backlog worldwide. It would take weeks for full visa issuing capacity to be achieved.
The H1B visa applicants, who were hopeful of joining high profile work places in the US, including in Silicon Valley, research and academic institutions, are now in limbo as they wait without a clear date in sight, reported The Wall Street Journal. Also affected are students whose plans to join the Fall semester in time.
The visa system has been operating at “significantly reduced capacity” for the past few days, and the State Department doesn’t know when the system will return to normal operations, a spokeswoman said Friday.
The State Department spokeswoman said she didn’t know how many document requests were affected by the glitch. The Bureau of Consular Affairs processes millions of visa requests each year.
The spokeswoman said visa processing was hit hardest by the computer problem. Passports continue to issued “well within” the standard four-to six-week standard set for approval time, she said, adding that the Bureau of Consular Affairs also continues to issue emergency passports, reported the Journal.
The system has experienced performance problems, including outages, since last Saturday, the spokeswoman said. The data base was brought back online last Wednesday afternoon, but the system continues to operate at significantly reduced capacity and will continue to do so until a backlog of documents is clear.
In 2013, the Bureau of Consular Affairs issued 9.1 million nonimmigrant visas and nearly 500,000 immigrant visas. The bureau operates 26 domestic passport agencies, three processing centers, two printing facilities and more than 8,400 passport applications world-wide.
The Washington Post reported that families adopting babies abroad were unable to bring them home because the babies’ visas couldn’t be printed.
From July 20 to July 28, State issued 180,000 non-immigrant visas worldwide when typically it would issue closer to 370,000, according to a State Department spokesperson.
On the FAQ list is a question on whether State will reimburse visa applicants “who missed flights/canceled weddings/missed funerals?”
“While it might be of little solace to those who have experienced hardship, we are always very careful to tell travelers NOT to make travel plans until they have a visa in hand. Even when the CCD is operating normally, there may be delays in printing visas,” Consular Affairs answers. “The Department does not have the authority to reimburse applicants for personal travel, nor do we include these costs when calculating our fees. The Department cannot refund visa fees except in the specific circumstances set out in our regulations.”
The State Department states it has one of the largest Oracle-based data warehouses in the world. It has reported that in 2009 the database contained over 100 million visa cases and 75 million photographs, with the addition of approximately 35,000 visa cases every day.
According to PC World, the computer problems may have affected up to 200,000 people, it emerged Thursday, as the scale of the problem became clear for the first time.
The problems began July 20 when engineers from Oracle and Microsoft applied a software patch to the State Department’s Consular Consolidated Database, which handles millions of passport and visa applications in the U.S. and at its embassies and consulates around the globe.
The patch was intended to solve several months of instability but instead crashed the system, which did not come back online until July 23.
Despite the crash, it looks like Oracle will be getting more business from the State Department. The department said it plans to upgrade to a newer version of Oracle’s database by the end of the year and build two fully redundant systems, said PC World.
7 Comments
why is this story from 2014 reposted?
crappy software written by cheap, foriegn labor. how ironic.
the irony is delicious, crappy computer systems made by H1B’s and outsourcing..are hindering H1B’s into America…I guess there really is some justice left in this world
Just another instantiation of, be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.
Ha Ha. Maybe they should have hired American citizens to write the software, instead of a bunch of half-priced, half-educated H1-Bs.
Hmmm…
Both Oracle and Microsoft are heavy users of the H-1B visa.
It would be funny if H-1B coders were ultimately found responsible for this mess!
Likely precisely the case.