Tarrant County government offices among those impacted by AT&T outage
FORT WORTH, Texas - Thursday’s service outage did cause disruptions for some Tarrant County services.
Residents trying to do tax-related transactions and deal with other types of services had difficulty making transactions.
It was a day of random wait times at Tarrant County's northeast courthouse, with property tax payment options and motor vehicle transactions affected by the AT&T outage.
"I just went and got some cash from the ATM, just in case. I drove up here and they couldn’t process my credit card. I was thinking about that thing with the phone also," April Hawkins said.
"That thing with the phone" Hawkins referred to was the widespread AT&T network outage that also slowed some Tarrant County government business.
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"It is randomly up and down," Tarrant County Tax Assessor Wendy Burgess said.
Offices for transactions, including motor vehicle titling and registration, rely on a statewide network.
Payment options for property taxes have also been affected, at times making credit card transactions impossible.
"[The statewide system] is intermittently up. When it is up, we are conducting transactions as it is up, however, it does go down very quickly. So as we are using that time wisely to handle the transactions," Burgess said. "It is bleeding over into some credit card system payments as well."
Burgess said the best back-up plan in these situations is to bring cash, cashier’s checks, or money orders.
She said an e-check payment option on the tax assessor’s website was not affected.
"People want to get in and out and go about their day, but thankfully, I didn’t have any issues today," Emily Lenard said.
"I heard about it last night. It did not affect me," Patricia Arnold said.
Many were fortunate, while others went prepared.
"I was like, if I gotta come up here, just let me go ahead and get cash," Hawkins added.
FOX 4 didn’t speak with anyone who had to wait longer than 20 minutes to handle their business. Many said, considering all that was happening, it wasn’t too bad.