Nigeria resumes passport services in US after Internet hitch

The United States of America’s passport manufacturing situation has been resolved by the Federal Government, and passport services have been restored at all three Missions.

A public notice published in the Nigerian Embassy in Washington, DC, states that all passport applicants who were previously booked for biometrics should visit the Mission on Monday.

This is to notify all passport applicants who were scheduled for biometric capture from Monday, November 13 to Thursday, November 16, that their appointments have been postponed, according to the message.

The new date of the event is Wednesday, November 22, 2023, instead of Monday, November 20. On any of the days, the impacted applicants are welcome to visit the Embassy.
We apologize for any trouble this may have caused. The Embassy’s internet outage is the reason for the timetable modification.

This news was confirmed on Sunday by an Embassy source who told the News Agency of Nigeria in New York that the issue had been fixed over the weekend.

“The system is back over the weekend,” he declared. We’re back after the specialists put forth endless effort to find a solution.On Saturday, we tested it after fixing it. The system has returned, and every center—in Atlanta as well as New York—is operating normally.

Because the DC server is linked to Atlanta and New York, any issues with our server have an impact on other Missions.

Speaking under anonymity, the source informed NAN that the issue was with the internet rather than the server and that whatever that happened to the internet also disconnected the other centers because the server is connected to the Embassy’s internet.
The source claims that the Nigerian specialists collaborated with the Embassy’s local ICT specialists, and together, they were able to resolve the issue.

According to NAN, Nigeria maintains three embassies in the US. These are the Nigerian Embassy in Washington, DC, and the Nigerian Consulates-General in New York and Atlanta.

Read Also: Assembly speaker loyal to governor Fubara escapes assassination

The consulates obtain biometric data from their missions and send it to the embassy in Washington, DC, the sole location in the United States dedicated to producing passports.

In the past, the Federal Government was requested by the Organization for the Advancement of Nigerians and its twenty partner organizations in New York to supply passport manufacture equipment for its missions located in Atlanta and New York.
“The most states are within the authority of the New York consulate, which also receives the greatest volume of applications from all throughout the country.

The group mused in a statement, “It boggles the mind to understand why two passport printing machines are located in Washington with none in New York or Atlanta.”

The twenty states of Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Nebraska, Ohio, and North Dakota are included in the New York Jurisdiction.

The others are Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont, South Dakota, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania.