Xerox "Routine Backup Test" Leave 17 States Without Food Stamps

An anonymous reader writes "People in Ohio, Michigan and 15 other states found themselves temporarily unable to use their food stamp debit-style cards on Saturday, after a routine test of backup systems by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a system failure. Xerox announced late in the evening that access has been restored for users in the 17 states affected by the outage, hours after the first problems were reported. 'Restarting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality,' spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer said in an email. An emergency voucher process was available in some of the areas while the problems were occurring, she said. U.S. Department of Agriculture spokeswoman Courtney Rowe underscored that the outage was not related to the government shutdown."

Comments

Re:Yes, it does

[lgw]

police, firemen, infrastructure, courts of law, whatever else

These are mostly local services provided by local government for usually quite modest taxes. The legitimate business of the government, stuff like this, simply doesn't take much in the way of taxes to fund, and at the federal level is about 20% of spending.

Our federal government is a pension plan with a military. Infrastructure and science funding and so on is a small sideline business.

I'm sure you'll enjoy your money in a country with 0% tax rate and no law enforcemen

Do you honestly think that adds anything to the discussion? We have serious financial difficulties coming our way in the US, and partisan hyperbole won't help solve these problems.