By Kim Kalunian, WPRO News
A statewide outage occurred for all State of Rhode Island office computers late Wednesday night and into Thursday morning.
The outage happened when a UPS (uninterrupted power supply) system back-up caused a power surge that knocked out electricity to the state's data center. The surge affected breakers and generators, and caused a loss of computer power from 11 p.m. Wednesday to 3 a.m. Thursday.
The outage affected all state offices, but lasted longer at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), whose computer system is older than other departments. Power wasn't restored at the DMV until the late morning.
Debbie Rich, spokeswoman for the DMV, said Thursday afternoon that computer power was restored and operations were back to normal. Those who visited the DMV during the outage were issued blue return tickets if they were unable to wait for the system to be restored.
