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EBT Food Stamp Debit Cards Stop Working in 17 States, But Restored Hours Later
People in 17 states were unable to buy groceries with their EBT debit cards this past Saturday after an apparent nationwide system failure. The U.S. Dept of Agriculture, however, insisted that the outage was not related to the federal government shutdown.
Just hours later, Xerox corp, who manages the technology behind the EBT system, announced that access had been restored for users affected by the outage. Spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer, commented, "Re-starting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality."
Affected states included Illinois, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Ohio, Michigan, and Maine.
During the outage, thousands of shoppers across the nation reportedly left carts of groceries behind because they couldn't get their benefits. Managers of the stores also began putting up signs saying their EBT systems were down.
Many feared it was because of the government shutdown, and expected it to last days or weeks, but it only lasted a few hours.
What do you think? Did the government shutdown have something to do with it?