The Department of State (DOS) continues to work and make progress to restore the visa system to full capacity and functionality. It is anticipated it will take weeks to resume full visa processing capacity. Visa applicants are advised they might still experience delays of up to one week in addition to normal processing times. Applicants should take this into consideration when making travel arrangements. The DOS continues to prioritize immigrant visas, including adoption cases. So far, they have been able to issue most cases with few delays.

So, what happened?

The U.S passport and Visa Database Crashed Leaving millions of Travelers Stranded.

On July 20th 2014, millions of people around the world were left waiting for U.S passports and visas. A glitch in the DOS’ Consular Consolidated Database resulted in outages in the processing of applications for passports, visas and reports of Americans born abroad.

The database is the DOS’ record system used to approve, record and print visas and other documents to ensure that national security checks are conducted on all applicants.

The problem was worldwide and not specific to any one country, citizenship document or visa category. Due to this problem there has been an extensive backlog of applications, which has also caused more problems with efforts to regain the system back on line.

At the time of the crash, it was not known how many people in total were affected, but it is thought that tens of thousands of applicants could have been affected around the world.

You can find more details at www.travel.state.gov , and also find contact information for your particular passport or visa query at http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/contact.html.

For more information about U.S. immigration and to see in which ways Ms. Lentini can help you, visit lentinivisas.com , or call Ms. Lentini at +630-262-1435, or email jacki@lentinivisas.com