Abimbola Bawa, a 48-year-old scrum master, traveled 45 minutes from Katy to get the title for her teenage daughter’s car.
She got to the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles this morning only to be turned away by a worker standing outside the door, who broke the news that an outage brought down the agency’s system.
“This is crazy,” she said when the worker broke the news.
The Texas DMV and Texas Department of Public Safety Driver’s License Offices were among the Texas agencies most affected by the outages.
A massive tech outage that started Thursday and spilled into Friday grounded planes, brought banking systems down and crashed websites worldwide, an unexpected delay for a normally inconvenient Houston errand escalated frustrations. If Houstonians didn’t have enough to deal with after post-hurricane power outages lasted more than a week for some, a system update by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused massive crashes to machines running Microsoft Windows on Friday.
At the Texas DPS, where it can take weeks to get an appointment, unsuspecting Houstonians parked their cars and took their folders of documents for what they thought would be a regular appointment for usually mundane tasks like transferring a car title.
“It’s just ridiculous because I have to drive out here,” said Bawa. “I have plans. I have to take off work to be able to come with her to get this and now they’re closed, and we don’t even know until when.”
Frustrated that she hadn’t been notified of the issue before hopping in her car to brave Houston’s Friday traffic, Bawa said she will probably come back next week.
“There should be some way to communicate with people to let them know there is a situation happening,” Bawa said. “It would have been easier for all of us rather than having to do that drive.”
Others took the unexpected inconvenience in stride.
Stanley Long, a lifelong Houstonian, got a ride from his daughter to the Department of Motor Vehicles on Friday to transfer the title of a recently deceased family member’s car into his name. He would have to take public transportation back though.
But he worried most about people with health issues and how they would get health care. He was grateful he was only inconvenienced for a small errand.
“It affects me just as much as it would affect anybody. I’m not injured or sick or anything,” said Long, a 63-year-old retired truck driver.
Angel Funes, a 53-year-old truck driver, planned to wait until noon to see if the system would come back. It was his day off and he came to fix an issue with the title of a car he recently bought.
After driving a half hour from north Houston, he figured he might as well see if the system came back soon.
“Maybe they’ll be open, maybe not.” Funes said. “It is what it is. It’s no good to cry.”
A Houstonian for more than a decade after moving from New York, Funes had grown accustomed to the curveballs the city throws at its residents.
“We spent seven days with no power,” he said. “We survive everything up here, from rain, tornadoes, all kinds of stuff. System down? It’s all good.”
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