Car inspections available in Massachusetts Wednesday, days after outage affected RMV
BOSTON - Massachusetts drivers will be able to get their vehicles inspected on Wednesday, days after a worldwide Microsoft outage affected services at the state's Registry of Motor Vehicles.
Motor vehicle inspections in Massachusetts were unavailable due to the global outage last Friday, which impacted the use of some RMV technology.
"The Registry continues to coordinate with its vendor, OPUS, and inspection sites with remaining issues," MassDOT said in a statement Tuesday.
When will car inspections be available in Massachusetts?
A spokesperson for MassDOT said state workers had to visit some inspection locations to manually reset affected computers.
Motor vehicle inspections will resume in Massachusetts on Wednesday, July 24.
The RMV is giving vehicle owners who need retests on failed inspections prior to July 19 more time to get them. Drivers now have until August 10, 2024 to get their free re-inspection.
Drivers in Massachusetts are required to get a safety inspection of their cars every year or face a traffic violation. The annual fee is $35.
No car inspection stickers
John McKenzie, owner of McKenzie Motors in Brighton, has been forced to turn away drivers looking for inspection stickers for several days because his machine was down.
"The machine does not communicate with the registry," he told WBZ-TV Tuesday. "If you can't get the machine to work, you're not getting a sticker."
McKenzie said inspections are about 30-percent of his business.
The RMV said motorcycle inspections are being offered at motorcycle stations.
Effects of the CrowdStrike Microsoft outage
Friday's outage caused by a software update from cybersecurity company CrowdStrike affected airlines, banks, health care systems and other businesses around the world. In Massachusetts, numerous flights at Logan Airport were impacted and local hospitals were forced to cancel appointments.
At the start of the outage, the RMV on Friday canceled appointments and was unable to accept online credit card payments for over half the day. The agency was still able to conduct road tests during the outage.
The RMV isn't the only entity seeing continued problems from the outage. Delta canceled flights for a fifth straight day Tuesday, as one of the airline's flight crew tracking tool was made inoperable by the outage.
