COLUMBIA, S.C. — Authorities are sharing new details about a major electronic benefits transfer (EBT) outage that impacted people in South Carolina and across the country.
For roughly 4 hours on Sunday, many who rely on government-issued benefits to purchase important items such as food were unable to use their provided cards in many stores.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said the outage lasted from about 12:30 p.m. to 4:20 p.m. ET and impacted the processing of EBT transactions in 20 states. Those states, according to the spokesperson, were using Conduent as their EBT host processor.
The USDA added that it expects to receive an incident report from Conduent "to understand the root cause of the outage."
Conduent shared additional details about the outage with News19.
“We experienced a temporary service interruption that affected EBT and other applications. The Conduent technology team has been able to successfully restore all impacted services pertaining to this matter," a representative from the company said." We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused."
Stacy Dean, the deputy undersecretary for USDA’s Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, also released a statement regarding the incident acknowledging the hardship placed on EBT cardholders.
“USDA understands how stressful it can be when individuals and families are unable to use their benefits to purchase the food they need," Dean said. "USDA is monitoring the situation and will continue to work closely with our state partners as we learn more about the outage.”
In South Carolina alone, more than 620,000 people who comprise more than 306,500 households participate in the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) based on July 2022 data. The program provides benefits to low-income individuals and families.