Thousands of People Across 17 States Lose Access to EBT Cards

People will benefits such as SNAP, TANF, and other programs had to leave grocery stores empty-handed recently, when the Xerox system that handles the service went down in 17 states.

An announcement was made on Saturday in Ohio, after thousands of food stamp card users were completely out of luck. The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services had this to say about the whole ordeal: “The problem is unrelated to the federal budget situation. Xerox’s cash and food assistance card payment systems went down at 11 am this morning. The cash system has been fixed; however, the EBT card system is still down. Xerox has assured ODJFS they are working to fix the problem as quickly as possible. All states that use Xerox systems are affected by the outage. Xerox is notifying retailers to go to the manual system, meaning SNAP customers can spend up to $50 until the system is back online. SNAP recipients should call the 800 number on the back of the card, and Xerox will guide them through the purchase process.”

Finally, around 10 pm on Saturday, the EBT system was restored to all 17 states.

Source: newsnet5.com