Virginia gov announces review of computer outage

By BOB LEWIS

RICHMOND, Va.

Government contracting giant Northrop Grumman Corp. will pay for an independent inquiry into a recent computer outage that kept people from getting drivers licenses and paying their taxes and delayed some welfare services.

McDonnell also announced Thursday that Department of Motor Vehicles offices will take the rare step of opening on Labor Day to accommodate the backlog of people unable to get their licenses since the outage hit Aug. 25.

The governor, clearly irked by the failure that hampered 26 of 89 state agencies, said he and the General Assembly's investigative arm, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, will choose who does the outside assessment.

"It was a failure of hardware, a board made by one of the subcontractors that has gone through literally tens of millions of hours of service at units around the country and has never had a failure. That's what they've told us," McDonnell told reporters Thursday afternoon. "But it failed."

"Any interruption of service like this is absolutely unacceptable," the governor said.

Besides the DMV - perhaps the state agency with the most face-to-face public interaction - the outage also delayed benefits issued by the Department of Social Services and affected the Department of Taxation. Much data the agencies use was corrupted during the crash. State, Northrop Grumman and other computer subcontractors are trying to restore the lost information.

McDonnell said he had told Northrop Grumman CEO Wes Bush that "extended lapses in state computer services was an unacceptable hardship on our citizens and employees." The outage, affecting 13 percent of the state's agencies, left volumes of digital data corrupted.

"I made clear that I expected the best around-the-clock recovery efforts possible in order to reclaim and restore all missing files and data," McDonnell said in a statement his office released.

Northrop Grumman holds a $2.4 billion, 10-year contract with the Virginia Information Technologies Agency to build, operate and maintain the state's 7-year-old, problem-plagued consolidated computer services bureaucracy. It is the largest single-vendor contract in Virginia history. The partnership has been repeatedly criticized in JLARC studies for poor and tardy delivery of services, cost overruns and system failures.

Gov. Bob McDonnell says Northrop Grumman will pay for an independent study into the recent computer outage that hit government agencies.

Linda A. Mills, president of Northrop Grumman's information services division, said in a written corporate statement that the company will "will reimburse the commonwealth for the reasonable costs of an assessment."