People visit the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Driver License Center at the Leon Valley Mega Center.
Billy Calzada / Staff photographer
MYSA
By Steven Santana
For the third consecutive day, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has canceled more appointments regarding driver licenses as the "upgrades" to its system continue. DPS posted an update to X, the site formerly known as Twitter, early Friday morning, saying that all appointments scheduled for Friday, September 8, have been canceled up
until 11 a.m.
DPS says that the only offices open with these services under regular business hours on Friday are the Garland Mega Center, Fort Worth Mega Center and Carrollton Mega Center. People who made appointments for Friday up until 11 a.m. will be notified by the email or phone number they provided to make the appointment. The agency is also promising people who lost their appointment will get priority when it comes to scheduling new appointments.
DPS continues to say the outage is due to upgrades to the system that began on Labor Day.
"There have been no security issues reported at this time," the notice says.
DPS also canceled driver license appointments on Wednesday, September 6, and Thursday, September 7. Initially, all appointments made until noon were dropped, but DPS later canceled the entire day of appointments.
People looking to renew their driver licenses, especially commercial, have been expressing their frustration under DPS posts on social media.
"My son just wants to learn to drive (something that will be helpful on our farm in rural Texas), but I have read comments here from Texans who have had their livelihood affected because of this," wrote Tammy Parker under DPS' Facebook post.
Another user on Reddit under a post about the system commented on Wednesday that they passed the written test and have received the certificate, but that certificate was about to expire.
"I have show up to their office a couple of times to request information but they always direct me to the website. Why do they make things harder than they need to be?" wrote Reddit user mechanical_zombie.
In August, DPS also faced a statewide outage to its vehicle inspection system that lasted three days. Back in May, the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles was hit with a statewide outage when its network and hardware failed. The outage lasted a day.