Earned benefit recipients on SNAP, and WIC in 17 states may have found it impossible to get food over the weekend as Xerox the company behind many of these benefits had an outage of its systems. Problems emerged for benefit systems in those states Saturday morning, and are supposed to be back online fully by monday.
According to the company, the temporary failure happened during a routine test of backup systems. Some retailers who accept earned benefit programs like SNAP and WIC have an emergency paper-based voucher system that allows beneficiaries to have access to their benefits. For states and retailers where that was applicable, vouchers have been filling the gap most of the weekend.
Xerox now says that service has been restored, and accounted for the outage in a statement – “Re-starting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality. {…} We continue to investigate the cause of the issue so we can take steps to ensure a similar interruption does not re-occur.”
The outage added further uncertainty to the beneficiaries of programs like SNAP and WIC which are facing suspension of benefits payments at the end of the month if Congress fails to come to a budget resolution and reopen the government. As those talks deteriorated over the weekend, the likelihood of a resolution before this deadline seems unlikely.
