Food Stamps Not Working in 17 States

For several hours, on Saturday, food stamps were not working in seventeen states.

A routine server test caused a fatal error and shut down the system.

The outage began Saturday morning, but was up for most areas by Saturday night.

Officials said that while the error was fixed within minutes, it takes hours for the systems to come fully online again.

Many people had been worrying that the outage was caused by the government shutdown.